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MS Must Ship Java With Windows Within 120 Days

Posted by timothy on from the but-at-least-it's-not-micromanagement dept.

Suppafly writes "Cnet is reporting that a federal judge on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to begin shipping Sun Microsystems' Java with the Windows operating system within 120 days, after the companies fought over implementing a ruling he made last month."

4 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. Not so fast by core+plexus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    While this is good news, it's not gone through the appeal yet; ""If my order doesn't get stayed or reversed (on appeal), it's going to get done," Motz said. Well, that's stating the obvious.

    Microsoft lawyers may be able to either stall it, get it reviewed, or even get it overturned. That's the way the law works. Likewise, there may be other avenues outside of the Courts that Microsoft may take.

    This little penguin doesn't forget favors

  2. Questions.... by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Will this mean that MS must fully integrate java into it's operating system? Or can they get away with just shipping either the free download off of the sun site or even just including a link to download it off it the sun website. Will they have to provide support for it over windows update, or do they only have to provide the initial download?

  3. How hard is it? by gwernol · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft, which told Motz on Thursday that shipping Java with Windows was not a simple matter and could harm large corporate users of Windows, is almost certain to appeal--a move the judge anticipated.

    Does anyone have details of what Microsoft claims was so hard about installing Java with Windows? Given that Sun already provide a complete Windows installer why can't they do this in 120 days? How could this "harm large corporate users". I know Microsoft are just stalling, but what argument did they put forward to the judge? Clearly it wasn't that convincing...

    --
    Sailing over the event horizon
  4. Re:Its about time by Narcissus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, this is a good thing. Just because the product you (unfortunately) support was not written to use the "real" Java, why should everyone else suffer? What was going on with development there, anyway? I'd take a stab and say that someone called out another buzz-word ("Yeah, I like it, but let's write it in Java!") at the time of design...

    If you're going to write a Java program, then you should write it to run in Java. Not MS' "Java". You should know that by not writing to the standard, you'll end up in trouble. It would be like me writing an app to use undocumented APIs, and then whinging when they're changed. If I'd have used what I was given properly, I would not have gotten into the mess, and I would have no-one to blame but myself.

    The fact that you have to support a program that was not written correctly is not our fault or problem. Don't get me wrong, I feel for you, but that doesn't change anything.