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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 :)
... because I could have sworn that 'Sun and Microsoft Settled Litigation' yesterday...
Looks like it loses 400 million dollars a day though, so pretty soon Sun'll be paying a huge wad of cash over to Bill...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
And i think we already went over how it gives Microsoft a "foot in the door" for interoperability with Unix via java and .NET.
First they ignored, then laughed and are now assimilating.
I hope Microsoft doesn't apply any pressure on Sun to get rid of Java or screw it up. They're probably acutely aware that this money will make it easier for them to destroy the highly portable and competitive language. It's a veritable C# killer!
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-->
I watched the video of Ballmer and McNealy boasting about their new patent regime.
I wonder what open source project will suffer first as they enforce these patents? Mono? JBoss?
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
writing at JDJ's online site, McNealy said he was pressured to try glasnost by his customers, who have mixed environments and wanted the companies to "stop the noise" and "get it together." Ballmer said there was "nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing" in the agreement, which was barely sketched, that "would not delight" both sets of customers.
This agreement recognizes that cutting edge R&D and intellectual property protection are the foundation for the growth and success of our industry.
This can be read: "MS loves SCO's thinking."
Microsoft could have just waited Sun out.
The next Slashdot duplicate story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is kind of scary. We all know that Sun's relationship with Linux is somewhat schizophrenic. Over the last month or two they've been fairly reasonable (Opteron-based servers and decent Linux support) but we all know that McNealy the Big Mouth Bass still thinks that Solaris is the way to go. He still thinks Sun can "win" in the marketplace with SPARC and Solaris, beating out commodity stuff in even the small installations where SPARC and Solaris don't have an advantage.
If McNealy thinks that getting in bed with Microsoft is going to give Sun a leg up over Linux, then there are going to be some very annoying times ahead.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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."
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Oh, well. MS wins again. First Apple, the DOJ, now Sun. The EU case doesn't have any real effect on MS from a business perspective. On the positive side, at least an infusion of cash will keep Sun from falling into the same sad state as SGI. Look, Apple dealt with the devil and went on to produce some great stuff. We can hope the same occurs with Sun. On the whole Java vs. C#, I honestly wish Sun would have made some of the same semantic improvements that MS came up with.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
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
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?
In the corporate/business world even when companies are partnering up, they are still always under consideration to be a competitor.
They are going up fight in the sales trenches just as they were before. Only difference would be the CEOs talking less trash.
Cats and dogs living together, the lamb and the lion sleeping together... mass hysteria.
;-)
What is the world coming to. Next thing you know, someone will tell me Microsoft is selling Linux
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Some articles Like this one Talk about how Sun is also cutting 3 300 jobs. Sucky.
Just being curious, but couldn't Sun's refusal to open source Java be a part of this Sun-MS agreement?
Getting rid of an open sourced Java opponent is i.m.h.o. more valuable to MS than the 1.6 G$ settlement fee.
Just my 0.02 $....
They can do what they like, patent-wise, but they can't kill Linux. The genie is out of the bottle. The Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, and the rest of the world (with the possible exception of the EU) will never bend over for any wacky patent or copyright claims from McNealy and Gates.
I can see the Chinese giggling right now. They've been copying MS disks for years and distributing them for free, despite government lip service RE shutting the counterfeiters down. Now the West is going to step on its own dick by restricting intellectual ideas? Great, say the Chinese, let us know how else we can eat your lunch, you stupid motherfuckers.
Linux development will continue unchecked. If Linux is stopped in the US and EU, so what. The rest of the world will continue merrily on. So fuck you, Bill, and fuck you, Scott. Enjoy the cash while you can, because the end of the story is being written, and you won't make it to the last chapter.
We already know that Sun and Microsoft are scared out of their wits by Linux, so the settlement between is not a surprise, particularly if we
.NEt seems to be winning the battle for mind-share already. Real shame as I happen to like Java and believe that it could really make a huge difference to our computing if it was in a better steward's hands, those of the open source community.
,20276755,00.htm
consider that both Sun and Microsoft are SCO supporters, I mean, licensees.
The real news is that SUN is bleeding money incessantly. If you read their published quarterly results and know a bit about accounting, you will realize that rather than use the settlement money as a one-time payment to offset current losses, they plan to spread it out over a number of quarters to pad future potential loses. This shows that Sun has very little faith in its own future.
From a cnet.com article on the same subject:
"For its fiscal third quarter, which ended Sunday, Sun expects revenue of $2.65 billion and a net loss of $710 million to $810 million, or 23
cents to 25 cents per share. The loss includes charges of about $350 million for an increase in the valuation allowance for deferred tax assets and about $200 million to restructure its work force and real estate, Sun said.
Excluding the charges, the loss would have been $200 million to $260 million, or 6 to 8 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thompson First Call was less pessimistic: a loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $2.85 billion.
The company says it has more than 35,000 employees worldwide, so the layoffs account for about 9 percent of its work force. The job cuts will affect all divisions and geographic areas, McGowan said. The majority of cuts will take place by the end of September, he added. Sun already had cut 8,500 employees in two major layoffs in 2001 and 2002."
I give Sun about 5 more years before it's bought out. Only saving grace would be if everyone got fiberoptic lines to their homes in the next few
years and they could rent you app space in their sun-rays servers for a few dollars a month. Somehow I don't see that happening...
And Java won't save them unless they turn it into the defacto language for desktop apps, which just isn't likely to happen.
For further reference on the Sun-SCO relationship, read this piece by David Berlind.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/m ai n/Could_Sun_hold_...
For SUN's initial SCO FUD, read this among many of the articles that they put out:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,20000617 33
It is obvious to anyone that cares to look that Sun is between a rock and a hard place.
The reason they called the Java Desktop System (JDS) by that name is so that they can switch from Linux to Solaris and continue to call it by
the same name, which is what they intend to do.
People really need to understand that Sun ain't no friend of ours. They opensource StarOffice to spite Microsoft and the community around Openoffice has built something that would have taken Sun years with more than 40 supported languages, more than Office, and another 35 in the works. SUN began to offer Linux servers because customers demanded it, simply because they did not want to be tied into a proprietary OS with proprietary hardware.
If SUN's management had some brains, they would focus on hardware, placed their bets on Linux and put Solaris in maintenance mode for those
that really want to run it. I still believe that Solaris is a very good OS for some very limited scenarios, but how will it compare to Linux
one, two, three, four and five years down the road?
On the long haul, Sun will be wasting a ton of resources that they could be using to build services higher-up-the-Linux stack. They could also improve their hardware and face the other real challenge that they are going to have a hard time facing: Inte
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
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).