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.

Comments

Helps, but Sun is still hurting.

[Godeke]

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.

All you had to do was use logic.....

[telstar]

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?

The disparity of timelines

[LetterJ]

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.

Re:The disparity of timelines

[Total_Wimp]

Damn, I wish I had mod points. This is the main problem with our courts in the age of the internet. Microsoft knows good and well that they can:

1. Do anything they want, regardless of legality
2. Use that "anything" to maintain their Monopoly, thereby continuing to collect ~10 billion a year for Windows and Office
3. Drag out the resulting court action for enough time that the technology their "anything" competed against is dead.
4. Settle the court action in a way that doesn't hurt their Windows or Office monopoly one bit, but that gives what looks like a windfall to the dead technology.
5. Promise they won't do it again.
6. In fact they never will do it again (on that same technology wink, wink).
7. Start the process over with a new technology.

Pennfield Jackson recognized this and described it very well in his judgment. He called it the "application barrier to entry". He didn't give much stock to the browser that was dead, Netscape, but instead described that the process of destroying Netscape was maintenance of Windows and Office.

If Jackson were to see the EU ruling, he would immediately dismiss any possibility that media players even matter and hone in on the fact that by getting a hold on the media player market, Microsoft helps ensure Windows dominance. By dragging this out in the court Media Player will have its chance to dominate, possibly past the point of no return, to the point that MS could care less about a tiny .5 billion fine. Even if they lose, because the process has taken so long they will have more than a chance to win in the end. They will win for Windows sake, because none of those Windows Media DRMed files are ever going to play on Linux, or Mac, or any other platform people might have otherwise been willing to run.

Sun: It's gone through the whole process. Java has been slowly dieing on the Windows platform and will be replaced by .Net for "mainstream" web sites. Microsoft will have ensured that your next computer purchase will have Windows pre-installed so you can run IE and properly use that .Net site. MS gets more than ~10 billion a year due to your purchase of Windows and they will have bought this for only ~2 billion dollars over ~5 years. Not a bad investment at all.

MS has truly learned how to "lose" these court cases and dance in the street at the condolence party.

TW

This is good for Sun

[Profane MuthaFucka]

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.

No need for conspiracy...

[Allen Zadr]

To your second point... Both Java and Microsoft have separate "single sign on" web solutions that are fully incompatible. And yes, this could mean that linux boxes could potentially run software that directly integrates with a .NET login group. That's not entirely a bad thing.

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.

Re:IBM vs. Sun

[drzhivago]

Cross-licensing patents is a common occurrence between technology companies. There really isn't anything unusual there, I think.

EU?

[Aardpig]

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.

This is a good deal - no Applets included

[SoopahMan]

An earlier post whined that Microsoft will not be shipping an updated JVM with Windows. That's a good thing:

1. 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).
   
   
2. 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.

Re:Does this mean Sun will be profitable this quar

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not sure who considers your comment insightful as it is very vaque. Come on /.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.

Re:Don't knock your inroads -- 1.1.x ain't bad

[rreyelts]

Our boss says we *have* to have generics, so Macs and their 1.4.x JVM are right out for development.

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.

Let's get *really* wierd...

[Anonymous Meoward]

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?