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Three Judges to Review Java Ruling on Thursday
Richard Finney writes " Reuter's Peter Kaplan is reporting that a three-judge panel in Richmond, Va. will hear arguments from Microsoft and Sun over whether it should uphold a Java 'must-carry' order imposed by a lower court judge in December. Here's a quick review of the issue: Microsoft signed an agreement with Sun on implementing Java. Microsoft implemented a non-compliant version ('embrace, extend, destroy' to their critics). Sun called them on it and as 'pushishment,' the courts said Microsoft had to carry the official Sun product for a while. Microsoft's lawyers seem to be on a winning streak lately and their spokesman Jim Dresler says the order is 'unprecedented, unnecessary and doesn't serve the public interest.' Some say this the deciding battle between Java and .NET. Too bad it's not being settled on the technical merits of both products."
non-compliant menas (accoridng to Sun) 'better than ours'. Nothing MS did broke your java apps running on windows.
Sure they did add features, but you were quite free not to use them, or to use them and say 'my app only runs on windows'. Frankly, what's the problem there, you could write your app using JNI to integrate with some Windows-only component. It wouldn't be cross-platform anymore but would be still compliant.
If Sun had actually sent Java off to become a standard, instead of pretending to, and MS has broken the standard then they'd be the bad boys here, but as it stands, I don't think Sun has anything but legal cr*p on their side.