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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!
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."
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
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
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. */
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?
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).