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MS Must Ship Java With Windows Within 120 Days
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."
Its been hell trying to suport end users with our web tool, that is java based, and having to walk them though installing/downloading java from Sun's site.
thelikesofwhich.com
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
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?
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
I agree they shouldn't be able to say you must include x.
However, from what I read earlier on in ths case it is not as simple. What I read was that MS had signed a contract with Sun that they would include Java and then backed out, so I guess this comes down to being the punishment for breach of contract, not just because Sun is whining.
Of course, Debian isn't an abusive monopoly (or abusive, or a monopoly) and hasn't made any efforts to kill Java, so the situation is rather different and a court wouldn't make that ruling, even if it were the case that we'd all be really, really, upset were the court to make it.
Microsoft is a convicted abusive monopolist. Microsoft used its dominant market position to control the market, and has used that control to crush its competitors or would be competitors. Microsoft's behaviour was immoral, has caused immeasurable damage to the industry as a whole, and was, rightly, found to be illegal. Get over it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
All of you that "feel bad" for Microsoft need to remember that this is happening because MS broke a binding agreement with Sun.
Don't feel bad for M$. They did violate the law.
.Net product. By excluding Java in favor of their own product, they are trying to leverage their desktop monopoly into another area.
A major point of law in the area of monopolies is that a company that has a monopoly in one area can't use that monopoly to build a second monopoly in another area.
M$ was using Java, then dropped Java entirely in order to promote their
By your example, Ford does not need to use Bosch brakes because Ford is an oligopoly, not a monopoly. If Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, etc. decided to start a joint venture to make their own brakes and exclude Bosch, the analogy would be more apt.
The Debian analogy also isn't valid. There are many viable commercial and non-commercial distros. And Debian also doesn't own a competing product.
I don't think that analogy works very well in this case. If you look at the history of the case, you'll see that the whole point of Java was to have a write-once, run-anywhere platform. Java published the specs to that, and Microsoft, having identified this as a great danger to its OS monopoly, hurried to try to break it as much as possible. Hence their coming out with a Microsoft VM which is, on purpose, incompatible with the Sun VM. As Sun owns the Java language and virtual machine specs, that's not only unfair but also illegal.
.NET (which is basically a repackaging of Java + network computers), should clue you in to the dishonesty with which they have been acting. Given all that bad behaviour, it's only fair to give Sun a few brownie points and a chance to get back on top with their excellent Java language, especially now that Micro$oft has had all the time they needed to come out with their competing version (.NET).
The fact that Microsoft, after bashing Sun's "Network Computers" initiative a few years back, is now coming out with its very own
Oh, and by the way, we're not talking about the Java compiler (which would be comparable to gcj which you mentioned), but about the Java Virtual Machine, which allows Java programs compiled elsewhere to run on your machine.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Yes they are competitors but once Microsoft started leveraging its monopoly through illegal business practices its a whole new ballgame. I'm not too upset about this ruling for that reason. Now if Microsoft had never screwed over sun or anything else for that matter, this ruling would definitly be unfair.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
What microsoft is doing is more akin to the phone company, a legally acknowledged monopoly, that blocks you from calling a competitor of theirs. Except in microsoft's case, they reroute the call to a mock phone company which provides different rates and services intentionally meant to dissaude people from switching to that competitor.
It's anti-competive. It's illegal. And this is a fair punishment.
Have people already forgotten that Microsoft has been convicted of the most anti-competitive and anti-free-market behavior possible? That the U.S government has been trying for a decade to rein in their behavior and bring some semblence of competition to the PC market?
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Sun start out suing MS to _remove_ Java from Windows, then sue to get it back in, and so on? A few times back and forth?
That's sort of obnoxious, like having a little brother with ADD and a mean streak.
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
It's not about preinstall. It's about the fact that M$ deliberately includes an outdated & mangled (something like 5 years now) version of Java to make it look bad.
Java and Linux are threat to microsoft, so it's good for M$ when another frustrated users curses 'that fu**ing java' again when it crashes on microsoft's ancient runtime.
Think it like this: how would you feel if all the games would preinstall some buggy old beta version of the display driver for the hardware that your company is manufacturing. If you do this, you should at least inform the users that something better is available.
Funny, if I click to open a pdf-document (without acroreader installed) my XP offers to search the right tool from the internet. I think it should behave the same way if double click on that *.jar - package.
No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (T. Pratchett)
As part of their contract, MS was forbidden to add public names to system packages (e.g. java.lang, java.net, etc). Nevertheless, they did so. There were some stretchers on both sides.
Microsoft PR claimed that Sun was forbidding them to add Windows specific extensions. This was silly - there was no problem with any number of packages named com.ms.* or whatever (except that the ms.com domain belongs to Morgan Stanley, and thus didn't follow the 3rd party naming convention - but that wasn't in the contract). There were some very nice extensions with proper names - like JDirect which let you call Microsoft DLL's without writing JNI glue. The problem was that Microsoft wanted to name some extensions java.*. This would of course cause the unwary programmer to inadvertantly create Java programs which only run on Windows - despite not knowingly using any MS specific packages. Exactly what MS wanted.
On Sun's part, the contract included a list of packages which Microsoft could not touch the public name space of. More system packages were added to Java 1.1. Sun claimed that Microsoft couldn't touch those either - reasonable, but they weren't in the specific list in the contract.
The completeness problem was along the same lines. Microsoft provided a complete 1.0 API. However, they left out components of the 1.1 API that competed with their own offerings. For instance, they left out RMI and offered DCOM support instead. Sun said that it was understood that the same restrictions regarding system name space pollution and completeness would apply to the packages of subsequent API versions. But this was not spelled out in the contract. It would not be in the ruthless spirit of Microsoft for them to follow the spirit of a contract if they could find a loophole.
Regardless of quibbling over whether the system package list under contract should expand to match new API versions, Microsoft polluted even core packages from 1.0 with handy additions sure to entice the unwary. So they were guilty even by the letter of the law.
Java has become one of the primary tools for enterprise development, mostly on the server, but also on enterprise clients, where downloading an applet or java app is typically not time consuming for the client because they are on a LAN.
What takes so long in software development? TESTING, and in java testing different versions of the VM. Up until this point, enterprises have been able to enforce a VM version on enterprise clients, and the developers can count on that version being on the client desktops. Now what? If the enterprise wants to stick with its 1.2.2 or 1.3.1 VM, they can't install WinXP SP2? What happens with the next SP and a new java VM? All enterprise java apps will need to be thoroughly tested with each new service pack, since Sun's VMs are not all backwards compatible.
In addition, if anyone is still righting java applets for the internet, how does this help? What percentage of users are going to have XP SP2 in the next 12-24 months?
This solves none of the Java VM version issues. This was Sun saying "wah wah" in court and getting a sympathetic judge.
Sun needs to hand over Java to the JCP and stop using it as a weapon in its fight against MS.