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Billion-Dollar Law Suit: Microsoft Not Entirely Out of Hot Water
Posted by Paul Szynol on Sunday, November 03 @ 11:06:22 EST News
In its March suit against Microsoft, Sun Microsystems alleged that Microsoft's business practices impeded use of Sun's Java. The company will press on with its billion dollar suit against Microsoft, Reuters reports. "Microsoft also faces private antitrust suits from consumers and from the world's largest Internet media company, AOL Time Warner."
 
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Re: Billion-Dollar Law Suit: Microsoft Not Entirely Out of Hot Water (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Monday, November 04 @ 21:38:44 EST
When Microsoft signed a license agreement to develop its own version of Sun's Java language, there was a basic misunderstanding between the two parties. Microsoft started out as a company providing programming languages, and it regarded Java as another language along with Basic, C, Fortran, and all the rest. It set out to make Java a first class language able to program any type of application that you could program in any other language.

For example, Microsoft gave its version of Java the ability to communicate with objects generated by other languages and applications. A Microsoft Java programmer could, from Java, load a copy of Excel, command it to load a spreadsheet from disk, plug in some numbers, rerun the calculations, and then extract the results back to the Java program. Alternately, some functions could be written in Java and called from an Excel cell.

Sun had a different world view. Sun wanted Java to absolutely the same in every operating system, even if that meant it would be unable to integrate with Office or use other Windows services.

So Sun went into court. First it claimed copyright infringement. When that didn't work, it claimed breach of contract. When they settled the contract issues out of court, Sun now is trying for antitrust.

Microsoft never did anything that blocked Sun's Java initiative. Sun's version of Java has installed and run on every version of Windows. Microsoft simply had a different view of Java. When it could, Microsoft followed its view. When it was blocked by Sun's court action, Microsoft made a clean break and followed different options.

Generally speaking, I am entitled to my own opinion. If I disagree with you, that doesn't give you the right to go into court and claim damages. Maybe your ideas would be more widely accepted if I didn't disagree with you. If I have some influence, that may effect your success substantially. But in the end you cannot recover damages because someone else has a different opinion.


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