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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.
1) MS is *not* pledging to keep Java up-to-date on the Windows platform, which basically means that applets like mine (see sig) have to use Java 1.1 and nothing higher. Sure, people can download the Java plugin, and lots do, but more don't. On a casual visit to a website, no-one will go through the rigmarole of downloading and installing the latest Java, just to see your applet...
2) I'm a bit concerned about the "As a result of this agreement, Sun and Microsoft engineers will cooperate to allow identity information to be easily shared between Microsoft Active Directory and the Sun Java System Identity Server" part. The single-signon used to be limited to MS-only platforms, now it has the capability to reach into linux-server land
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.
It might just slap the EU back into line a bit as well, considering that MS will *spend* $2B to *possibly get* an advantage. What was that fine again ? (Yes, I know about the other measures, but you can only respond with what you have, and MS has loads of cash)
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Ha ha, very funny. April Fools...no wait, it's the second! Wow, imagine that!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Doubling your available cash assests (Yahoo Finance) will help, but the company is still bleeding money. (Dropping 3,000+ jobs will also help.) Really what this appears to mean is that Microsoft has put Sun on life support so they don't become the only vendor in the virtual machine driven software development market. Imagine the potential antitrust suit if Java wasn't there to compete against dot Net. Frankly, I think this shows that Microsoft thinks it is winning this battle, otherwise they wouldn't have thrown the bone to them.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Seriously ... what's the point of having a place with Windows if there's no Sun out there to light things up? By the way ... Is it still April 1st in some timezone I'm not aware of?
SCO and IBM settled their long standing dispute with IBM agreeing to pay SCO 3 billions and SCO accepting that Linux source code does not belong to them :-)
And Bill Gates and RMS met over a dinner and shared jokes about their college days.
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
The disparity of timelines between activities in technology and those in court is staggering. If you look even just at this case and the anti-trust case against Microsoft, they're still arguing about issues in court that have pretty much been steamrolled by technology. As a result, the settlements and results are less than satisfying for anyone other than the lawyers. I mean, Sun and Microsoft have been fighting about this for several years. By now, anyone needing to use a JDK on Windows has set up methods for making sure it's there, and Microsoft has done their entire .NET strategy.
This is almost like divorce arguments where people fight over furniture even though both sides have long since replaced the disputed furniture. When it's over, all that happens is that someone now has a couch they don't have room for.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Microsoft dammaged Sun with MSJava, Sun sued to stop it. Sun won and Microsoft started shipping Sun Java. Sun sued to stop that as well. Microsoft shipped no Java, this hurt Sun more then MSJava and was Suns own fault. Sun didn't know when to stop, there was a point where all was well and Microsoft was shipping the right product. Ah well.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Any general knows that fighting a two front war is a bad thing, and Sun has effectively limited one of the fronts they are fighting on. But, the other front could kill them. IBM has a special mission to kill Sun dead, and they are a formidable foe. With their sweet computers (all of which run Linux) and their low prices, Sun can barely compete.
Sun needed this cash and the break with the fight with Microsoft. But I doubt that in the long run it will be enough. Their Opteron strategy just has to pay off for them if they want to last another 10 years.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
$2 Billion is the most that Microsoft has EVER payed out to any company. To reach a settlement like this, they may have future plans to do a lot more with Java. Technology sharing...
-- Len
Microsoft has continuously tried to defeat Linux by forcing features on users that are incompatible with Linux, while Linux produces a workaround or a compatability layer. Well, this would be one less thing to try and workaround.
I don't think this is an advantage for Microsoft as now .NET developers can choose to use hybrid Java/.NET solutions that both do authentication depending on which language is the better choice for that task.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
After all the rancor over the last few years the wording of the press release is so mechical...I wonder if you can see Scott McNealy's new borg implant blinking in the video coverage.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I notice a number of people commenting on the balance of Microsoft's cash on hand. I believe that we will witness erosion of the giant rather than the instant destruction. A billion here five hundred million there, a few lost customers, a few governmental restrictions, pressure to give deep discounts they all add up and over time the surplus will erode away. How are they going to fight when they can't throw money at their problems, when they can't afford to take a loss in furtherance of their strangle hold?
i believe the most interesting line is:
Sun is also satisfied that the agreements announced today satisfy the objectives it was pursuing in the EU actions pending against Microsoft.
As Sun was the major complaining competitor in the EU case, this gives M$ a lot of fire support when trying to challenge the record fine. Another indication is the timing: shortly after the EU announced the fine.
Regards, Martin
Think about it; think about how little $2B is to MS, compared to 10 years with no harassment from Sun.
William Henry Gates III is the greatest capitalist tactician since John D. Rockefeller. I do not see that as necessarily positive. But, damn, he can sure play the game.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
$2,000,000,000 changes a person.
From the press release:
"Patents and Intellectual Property: The parties have agreed to a broad covenant not to sue with respect to all past patent infringement claims they may have against each other. The agreement also provides for potential future extensions of this type of covenant. The two companies have also agreed to embark on negotiations for a patent cross-license agreement between them. "
I expect Solaris10-patent/Linux lawsuits to follow. With the MSFT involvement, I think Sun's the next SCO.
I would hope not; but this seems like an interesting fear. Seems Sun is the last Unix vendor left whose strategy is based on a very large R&D investment in a proprietary Unix; and it is in both their interest and Microsoft's for Sun to protect this investment.
Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property
Compare this $2B with the $600M fine levied by the European Union. The difference between the two values is revealing, and can be intepreted in two ways. Either the EU judgement was yet another fudge, and Microsoft have once more got off lightly after being convicted of monopoly abuse.
Or, a large part of the intellectual property sharing is a Java payoff. In particular, Sun may have agreed to waive any complaints regarding the fact that C# is lifted from Java, in return for the large pile of cash.
Personally, I think both explainations are equally probable, and the reality is an admixture of the two.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
- Applets are one of the worst technologies ever wrought on the Web. ActiveX is about as bad, and Push was bad but at least we didn't have to ever use it. If Applets will now be outdated too, maybe there will be less of them. This is good for Microsoft (less Java) and for Sun (less embarassing Java).
- JVMs change constantly. The JVM I write my app for is probably not the one you wrote yours for. Rarely do people deploy Java assuming it ought to run - they specify a JVM it's intended for, and often demand you install that JVM and point to it for their software. JVMs coexist very peacefully. The point is, there's no sense in Windows shipping with a JVM - you're just going to go around it with each Java product you install anyway.
Now, is this deal is actually good for both companies? Microsoft tends to make a very poor bed partner - they give you sweaty sheets for a few months and then throw everything you own out the window. Just look at how they've turned their backs on nVidia after the Xbox partnership - and Microsoft bashers can provide many more historical examples. Sun will need a very strong strategy that leverages the benefits of the combined technology beyond Microsoft's reach if they intend to gain from this - like the way nVidia used Microsoft's money to launch into the motherboard market.This show us, once again, that Microsoft can and will buy whatever it wants. Sun now lives on the Redmond food chain. They toe the line or, in the end, they die.
There is only one way to survive against an entity that controls a bottomless pile of cash. That is to NOT be for sale. Any for-profit enterprise, like Sun, is for sale and the Gates machine can buy whatever it wants.
But Gates and his horde can't buy Linux; they can't buy Open Source, they can't buy Free Software. This scares them and, in that, lies our only hope.
Two points, catered to delivering Java-powered client applications to John Q. Public effortlessly (let's face it; that's what applets did):
Up until now, you could release a Java 1.1.x compatible *application* (no security sandbox) without worrying about Granny Smith even having been able to spell jre when she was downloading. That's a good thing. 1.1.x is plenty to check and see if there's a Java 2 JRE laying around, and helping Granny get it if you absolutely need it.
Which brings me to point 2... Do you really *need* Java 2, or do you just want it? Admittedly Swing is a little buggy on 1.1.4 [if you include swingall.jar], which is as far as MS's VM got before the mess started, but Oracle still ships a version of 1.1.8 to power its management tools. There's very little you can't do with 1.1.x, especially once you've got the Collections API in the mix.
I've seen emails go across the Apple Java Development mailing list saying things like, "Our boss says we *have* to have generics, so Macs and their 1.4.x JVM are right out for development." Look, these are things you've been happily *not* using for all of Java's existence, that older code still works in 1.5, yet you're moving the whole of your development over b/c you think a new, just out of beta feature is cool? "As if source code rusted."
This settlement is great news for Java on the desktop. The longer you can keep more of your code 1.1 friendly, the longer you can deploy effortlessly on Windows. That window had almost closed, and now it's back, wide open.
And from the press release, though I'm not so optimistic to believe it'll necessarily be the case, there's nothing ruling out MS's installation of a newer version of Sun's jre by default in the future. Heck, it ain't jre's or clr's that boost an OS, it's, "Developers, developers, developers, developers." Maybe MS sees the more the merrier, and would prefer things like Sun's Mad Hatter not gain any special traction. Reminds me a little of AOL dropping Mozilla (which it based the OS X AOL client on as proof of concept in the Great Game of 0110 Chicken 2003) the second after MS relicensed them the IE engine.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
As usual, this comment is almost correct, but not quite. Please try not to oversimplify if you don't know what you are talking about. The reason Sun had MS stop distributing the JRE was because the only JRE MS could legally distribute when they had to include it in the OS was JRE 1.1.8. If you at all know about the Java industry, JRE 1.1.8 came out pre-1998 and Java is about to release 1.5 after 1.2.x, 1.3.x, and 1.4.x. So, if you were a company that wants developers to use the latest and greatest in what Java has to offer in their applets, then you definitely don't want JRE 1.1.8 being distributed. This is crippling the devolpment of at most applet development in the whole scheme of things that Java is used for. As a developer, you would have to consider this if you want to include as many people as possible into your web audience, which in effect forces development to pre-1999 levels of Java for applet development. That sucks.
/.er's, don't be so gullible to reward stupid rhetoric. For all we know, this person is an MS fanboy and purposefully not mentioning details that would otherwise make things a little clearer to form an opinion on. Either it's that, or this person is lazy and stupid and doesn't do his homework before opening his big mouth. So, do your due dilligence before repeating corporate bullshit, you mimic.
Not sure who considers your comment insightful as it is very vaque. Come on
More interesting is the possible poison pill of Sun fixing .net and Sun selling windows on their opteron boxes.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
This is bad for SUNW and the shareholders, no doubt. Yes, McNeally and friends do get a lifeline of cash, but I'm sure MSFT is aware that they're merely postponing the inevitable.
What this means IMO is that SUNW is a more viable takeover target than they were 24 hours ago.
Granted, they could buy back shares with the new cash (and may want to, for many reasons), but the underlying business plan is very vulnerable. Linux is eating Solaris' lunch, and a custom hardware solution isn't cutting it today in the marketplace. (I know, Sun servers are fun to work with, quite reliable, blah blah blah. But I know a few organizations that are abandoning Solaris for Linux, if only for the price advantage.)
I'd be looking for suitors right about now, if I were part of SUNW's mgmt. team. (Or I'd flip off everyone in Mountain View and unfurl the golden parachute, depending on what kind of bastard I felt like that day.)
So here's an idea to debate: another Unix vendor is desperately trying to break into the server and enterprise computing market. Assuming that said vendor has the cash and the will to use it (big assumptions there, I know), would this be a worthwhile strategy to pursue?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.