Slashdot Mirror
Sun and Microsoft Make Nice
DrLudicrous writes "Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have reached some kind of settlement (NYTimes, registration required) with regards to patent issues and Sun's antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft is apparently going to pay Sun about 1.6 billion US dollars, join into a ten-year pact of cooperation, and resolve a set of patent disputes. This has been in the works for about a year, starting as a series of phone calls between Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer. You can also catch the story here." update oh well, it's a duplicate. Nothing else interesting happening today :)
You can live in denial, or you can just accept that MS and Sun is going to turn on linux and Free Software in general.
Brought together by a common enemy.
Sure, MS will dispose of Sun sooner or later, but after they've done how much damage?
It's in Microsoft's interest for Sun to survive because it weakens the monopoly case against it (the same way Intel keeps AMD alive). The more healthy Sun is, the more MS can point to them as a viable competitor in the server market. Indeed, this is a little reminiscient of Microsoft's investment in Apple a few years ago, which preserved that company as a nominal competitor in the desktop market. This might be called "managed competition".
"...Like two spent swimmers that do cling together/And thus choke their art..."
.Net/Java thing. Let Java be Java, and let .Net be, uh, well, let it be.
Not that Microsoft is in danger of going down the tubes anytime soon, but this has been a real pain in the neck for them and they're better off not having to combat the
It's sad to see what kind of shape Sun is in lately, but maybe they'll be able to focus on being a business instead of a party to a cancerous lawsuit.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Ever heard of the Java Desktop System...enough Linux for you there? Mcnealy is late to the party, but at least he's now there - largely thanks to new his newly-anointed COO, J Schwartz
But for Sun, which had rose through the ranks of a dozens similar workstation manufacturers through foresight, engineering skill and hard competition, Microsoft's mediocrity is an affront.
While Sun has had decent hardware, it wasn't better than SGI or HP. They were stagnant on the user side of innovation. There is no reason why Sun couldn't have developed a KDE or Gnome type UI (although I was mostly happy with Openlook...) They had years of warning in advance of MS who didn't really have a network interface until 1995ish and they failed to exploit it.
On the server side, they may have been the last *nix company to start bundling commonly installed GNU/OSS software in their distro like perl and bash.
In the 90s, McNeally is on record as saying if he had been Bill Gates, he'd have done the same stuff, referring to the business practices of MS.
The workstation manufacturers like SGI and Sun blew their chances because they used expensive, custom hardware and charged by the pound and were very slow to innovate from a user perspective. They targetted science, research, and graphics shops that could afford their hardware, because at the time it was the best performing. As soon as Intel and AMD caught up in hardware, and Linux and MS with the OS, their advantage disappeared quickly.
Sun will be remembered no differently than Netscape or Real, who blew their chances by stagnating. Don't get me wrong, MS's business practices are shameful, if not illegal, but the real problem is that MS was allowed the opportunity to catch up.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
The first envelope was marked: "Open after a weak quarter". Inside was a slip of paper that said, "Bash Microsoft at every opportunity. Sue them for antitrust violations, write memorandum to the DOJ and EU, badmouth their products and strategy, hire joke writers to come up with nasty bits about how awful they are." The second was marked "Open only when your job is in serious jeopardy" and it said: "Settle with Microsoft. Get a nice piece of their monopoly profits to tide you over, do platform cross-licensing, appear on stage with Bill and Steve and talk about partnership and interoperability for the benefit of customers." And the last was "When the board is meeting to discuss your job." Inside was a paper that said only "Prepare three envelopes."
That's weird. If you're a customer (implying that you're PAYING for this site), why isn't there a star next to your name?
/. number, but that doesn't entitle you to any special bitching rights.
I see your low
But that's just like my opinion man.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
The reason Micrsoft patents everything is to protect them from frivalous lawsuits (e.g. Eolas). Microsoft only pulled it's muscle on a few patent cases (e.g. Lindows).
Microsoft has patents on stuff that Open Source uses, has patents on stuff Sun is using, etc. And the other way around.
The cost of lawsuits is too expensive, esp for little details like an icon or what not. But companies (Eolas for having a page get information from another server?!) are created just to create items that Microsoft has not patented and sue them. Just look at Eolas - it's one guy and he was asking for 500 million for something that has been around for at least 10 years.
MS has found that sometimes, they cannot win from open source projects on their products' merits alone. FUD isn't working as well as it used to either. And their monopoly position and the use they make of it is turning against them as well: people and even companies choose alternatives over Microsoft products, not because of the products themselves, but because they dislike MS. Hell, MS can't even buy or assimilate threatening open-source products because there's no owning entity to buy.
So what's left to them? That's right, you work to outlaw the competition, or at least its products. And if there's no way to sue the producers of software infringing on your intellectual property, you sue the users! What better deterrent can you think of? SCO has shown MS the light and the way.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
For example:
Interviews where they explicitly say that they wouldn't have done the deal except that it puts pressor on IBM.
That "Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back."
that Forrester somehow thinks this is good for Sun - I bet he thinks the SCO/MSFT partnership's good for SCO too. It's sad to see Sun turn into just another SCO. Can I get a "+1 Sad" mod?
Any company that has partnered with MS seems to have been either bought by, or hindered by things like this. EG: Netscape -> gone for all intents and purpses, and while mozilla lives on, the market share is small. Real.com -> While they are still around, who uses real over windows media player or quicktime? Corel -> yeah they are still around, but didn't MS dump its stock in them? Mac -> MS owns part of Mac, or at least last time I checked they did.
My guess is that Sun and MS would play real nice in Windows services for UNIX, of course I just use cygwin and don't pay for more MS licenses.
Just my 2 cents.... I know Sun is in trouble and they are probably doing this as a last resort, to save money.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Microsoft would rather have the battle on Sun's turf- even if that means keeping Sun alive! I think the two will fight open source with patents.
Sun and Microsoft could have partitioned the 1.6 Billion in any way they saw fit. They put the bulk of into into Licensing patents. Not so much for damages from violating anti trust law. They are saying this: We think IP is important, antiTrust law is not important.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Sun also has been pushing a version of its Java software as an alternative to the Windows operating system for personal computers.
I'm certain the author in the Washington Post article is refering to "Java Desktop System" which is the name of a Linux distribution.
The earlier comment the author makes:
Linux-based systems, marketed by IBM and others, have made strong inroads in the corporate-systems market. So far, Sun has been the primary victim, but Linux has provided more competition for Microsoft than has any software in years.
Leads me to believe that he doesn't realize Sun are also involved in Linux as an OS (not just providing applications such as the StarOffice suite).