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Sun and Microsoft Settle Litigation
spurious cowherd writes "According to The Register Sun Microsystems & Microsoft have reached a settlement in their several lawsuits aainst each other. Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property." There's a press release to read as well.
Sun settles with Microsoft, cuts 3,300 jobs
.Net Web services technology "dot-Not." He often used the world "hairball" in describing Microsoft's proprietary software.
http://www.yahoo.com/_ylh=X3oDMTB1c2ZmZzF2BF9TAz I3 MTYxNDkEdGVzdAMwBHRtcGwDbnMtYmV0YQ--/s/171067
Sun Settles With Microsoft, Cuts Jobs
17 minutes ago
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By MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Struggling server maker Sun Microsystems Inc. reached a sweeping, $1.6 billion settlement with Microsoft Corp. and said it plans to cooperate with its longtime nemesis, a company it had branded an unrepentant monopolist.
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The surprise agreement was accompanied by an announcement Friday by Sun that it is cutting 3,300 jobs and that its net loss for the fiscal third quarter will be wider than expected. The cuts represent 9 percent of its total work force of more than 35,000.
The "broad cooperating agreement" with Microsoft ends Sun's $1 billion private antitrust suit against the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Sun's complaints also helped spark the investigation that led to the European Union (news - web sites)'s recent record fine against Microsoft.
"It puts peace on the table in a big way," said Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive, during a conference call Friday.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will pay Sun $700 million to resolve the antitrust case, which was scheduled to go to trial in January 2006, and $900 million to resolve patent issues. Sun and Microsoft also will pay royalties for each others' technologies.
"Our companies will continue to compete hard, but this agreement creates a new basis for cooperation that will benefit the customers of both companies," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer.
Sun's biggest claim -- and the main charge in its antitrust against Microsoft -- involved the Java programming environment Sun created to allow software to run on all computers regardless of the operating system.
Sun said Microsoft violated its license agreement by creating its own version of Java, thus making it less universal. Though a settlement of that case was reached, both sides ended up in court again after Microsoft said it planned to stop supporting Java.
Under Friday's agreement, Microsoft "may continue to provide product support" for its version of the software, called Microsoft Java Virtual Machine.
The deal also creates cooperation between the companies in the technical area of Web-based applications and user identity management between Sun and Microsoft servers. Sun also agreed to sign a license that will allow its software to better communicate with Windows-based desktop computers.
The agreement settles Sun's complaint over Microsoft's server communications that led to the EU's decision against Microsoft last month. That ruling also was based on Microsoft's bundling of its media player with its ubiquitous Windows operating system, though Sun did not play a role in that complaint.
"Sun is also satisfied that the agreements announced today satisfy the objectives it was pursuing in the EU actions pending against Microsoft," Sun said in a statement Friday.
The agreement is an unprecedented change in the relationship between the two companies.
Sun's McNealy often railed against Microsoft, repeatedly calling Microsoft a monopoly and its
But the anti-Microsoft rants quieted in recent months, as Sun struggled to post a profit and the companies worked at resolving the issues between them. On Friday, Sun executives s
I agree with most of what you said. However people not downloading a "new" JVM is becoming far less of an issue. As more and more people get higher speed access to the net and the download/install of the jvm gets better this will become a non-issue. The current JVM is around 5MB and installs without much of a problem on Windows. This is little different than flash. A new version comes out and if I want to view that site, I have to download it and install it.
Now for the more serious matter. You better stop developing applets. They are almost dead. Look at the webstart stuff. That appears to be the direction Sun has been going for a while now. Also, I don't see how you are in any worse of a position now than before this agreement between Sun and Microsoft took place, in regards to Applets. Microsoft was NEVER EVER going to ship a Sun 1.2 or 1.3 or 1.4 or 1.5 compatable JVM. Most developers knew this for a while. The last thing Microsoft wants is for their OS to not be needed.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
1. Camino is (unfortuntaely) very poor at figuring out that JNLP files are actually executable and safe. Safari does a much better job with them.
2. It's a complete application to access databases. You can see it here: http://www.datadino.com. It requests unrestricted access from you so that it can talk over the network and stash drivers on the hard disk. If you go to Up2Go, you'll find plenty of applications that don't request extra permissions.
3. Do you know of any other technologies that actually *warn* you when launching a potentially unsafe application? Microsoft thought it was A-OK to allow embedded web controls full access to your machine. Now ActiveX controls are responsible for auto-installing web-toolbars and spyware.
Sorry I forgot about the security warning. If it really bothers you, go try an application on Up2Go that's marked 100% safe.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Several things stand out.
1. 900 Million of the award was to resolve patent issues. That's a pretty huge number (in fact it's the highest patent violation settlement I have ever seen.
2."Sun and Microsoft have agreed to pay royalties for use of each other's technology, with Microsoft making an up-front payment of $350 million and Sun making payments when this technology is incorporated into its server products." So MS and Sun have a cross licensing aggreement and SUN will pay them when the technology is incorporated.
The total award is actually 1.6 Billion. The 350 Million mentioned in the article is the first upfront payment. The cross licensing of patents is the important feature of the settlement. The collaboration is less newsworthy as it was mandated by the settlement with the DOJ.
Thalasar
SUNW's market capital is $16.01B at 50% of that is $8.005B. Minus the $1.2B, MSFT could buy majority control of SUNW for $6.805B + $1. Hmm it seems that MSFT has something up its sleeve.
- In the U.S. "billion" is 10^9. (10^12 is called "trillion".)
- In the U.K. "billion" is 10^12. (10^9 is called "thousand million".)
- I dunno about the rest of the world.
However, even though the Register is apparently a U.K. entity, I don't think anyone believes that M$ is going to pay Sun 2*10^12 dollars. $2*10^9 is already a huge amount of money. $2*10^12 is an ungodly amount of money.You write your nine symphonies, then you die.
The current JVM is around 5MB and installs without much of a problem on Windows.
Actually, it's 15MB
Now for the more serious matter. You better stop developing applets. They are almost dead. Look at the webstart stuff.
While WebStart is sweet, Java 1.1 (what Windows ships with) compatible applets are still the only practical way to deliver moderately complex applications via the browser to about 95% of the users. And before you say Flash - it is suitable for pretty graphics and animations, not serious things.
"If I were being really cynical, I might conclude that MS had spent $2B of it's ample reserves to purchase an extension of single-sign-on into unix (linux and solaris) territory at a time when Sun needed cash."
Sun doesn't "need" the cash. They have 2Bill in debts, and 6Bill in cash already. They are in a very, very good financial situation. Its part of the reason that they don't care as much about the price of the stock. Sure, 2Bill is a lot of money, but they're doing ok without it.
you are comparing chalk and cheese mate. JAVA applets cannot be replaced by perl or php.
.NET's aspx code behind) to writing well structured MVC (and similar patterns) applications. i'm not saying that perl or php do not have their place, i'm a big fan of both languages, but i don't believe that one should discount the advantages of JAVA when the architecture and environment is appropriate.
and why you make the statement that it sucks is beyond me (actually, its not - this is slashdot after all!). there are very good reasons and applications for JAVA, especially in the enterprise environment where you can leverage a very rich set of specifications (J2EE) to handle complex tasks such as transaction control (2/3-phase commit!) and messaging integration to name but a few. additionally scripting languages such as perl and php generally encourage a blend of application and UI logical, whereas the JSP/Servlet/Bean relationship does lend itself nicely (perhaps not as nicely as
this JAVA sucks blanket statement is generally flaunted because a) its not open source and b) the misconception that JAVA is very slow. 1.1 was pretty darn slow sure, but performance has continued to increase to a point where 1.4 is pretty snappy - even at UI-based work with SWING.
I'd just like to point out that you can still target pre-1.5 JVMs (i.e. 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4) while still developing using the new 1.5 Java language.
You can use my free, open-source, tool, Retroweaver (which has "blessings" from Sun's compiler team), or you can pay money for CodeGuide.
Depends on what your using your desktop for. Solaris at the desktop tends to be a preference a user makes. If your developing for a Solaris environment you may want to use your local workstation as a sandbox for local development/testing. While this isn't a requirement (all depends on what your developing), it does add a level of confidence.
As for Sun pushing Java Desktop System (JDS), they are really pushing 3 solutions:
Solaris SPARC
Solaris x86
Java Desktop System
Ultimately they are trying to push applications that are binary compatible across all three solutions. This will allow the user to decide which platform meets their needs. I believe we'll see more of the JDS systems than the others at the desktop level, but that's just an opinion.
BTW - If you have a chance to sit at one of the Sun Blade systems, don't pass it up. The system works well for geospatial applications (generally CPU/graphically intense applications).
FYI - Windows doesn't ship with the Microsoft VM anymore. New machines from Dell, and others ship with the Sun JRE.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/