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| Bob
Walder Oh dear, Microsoft is at it again. The Redmond giant�s on-again-off-again romance with Java has reached a new plateau of stupidity, with law suits and counter suits flying around between Microsoft and Sun, and the whole pile of dirty washing aired in cyberspace. Sun has accused Microsoft of infringing its Java license, false advertising, breach of contract and unfair competition (that�s a new one!) In addition to demanding Microsoft�s compliance with its license, Sun has asked for $35 million in compensation. The whole thing started when Sun discovered that Microsoft�s latest browser, Internet Explorer 4.0, was not compliant with Java Development Kit 1.1. It alleged that the company�s failure to include a Native Java Interface and Remote Method Invocation contravened the terms of its Java license. Sun also accused Microsoft of altering the name of the class libraries which deceived developers into believing they were writing to Java when they were actually writing to Windows. Surely Microsoft wouldn�t be that sneaky? Microsoft defends it position stoically, however, and has taken the unusual step of posting the offending licensing agreement on its Web site. For its part, it maintains that RMI significantly overlaps the DCOM functionality already available under Windows, and that there is no point in implementing it. Bill Gates himself told a panel of journalists in Switzerland recently that the claims have no real merit, and that someone should conduct a compliance test. Gates is confident that Microsoft does a better job of passing those compliance tests than anybody else, including Sun. Meanwhile, Sun says it will cut Microsoft off from any new Java technology until the suit is settled. This could actually do more harm to Microsoft and its new browser offering than the law suit and the $35 million claim, since it could cause a loss of credibility for IE 4.0 and a loss of functionality down the road if Microsoft can't implement new Java features as they appear. Sun says that no matter what happens, however, Windows users will have complete Java access through Sun's Java Runtime Environment for Windows. Bearing in mind that $35 million is small change to Microsoft, and the fact that developers continue to favour the Microsoft platform despite the lure of the "Write One Run Anywhere" promise of Java, it is difficult to see what Sun will gain from this action. It is, of course, in a somewhat invidious position - on the one hand it risks upsetting one of its biggest "customers" and stifling the progress of the language, whilst on the other it risks diluting the value of Java by letting Microsoft get off scot free. At the end of the day, as much as it didn�t want to go up against Microsoft, Sun had no choice if it was to be seen to be effectively policing the Java world. In an attempt to hit Microsoft where it hurts, Sun is now encouraging users to switch to Netscape to force Microsoft into full Java compatibility. Hardened IE users will not be keen to do this, however, and in any case would be well advised to wait for the results of any compliance tests. Whichever way you look at it, Sun is in a bad position. Microsoft will defend the action to the hilt and drag it through the courts for as long as it takes everyone to get fed up with it. Meanwhile, Java will inevitably suffer as a result - the momentum of Java has already been blunted by rumours that it is not consistent, for instance. But given that this row has been brewing for a while, perhaps that�s what Microsoft wanted all along? Finally, last month I mentioned the new technology that aims to provide 1Mbps over the mains power lines. What I failed to pick up on at the time was that the 1Mbps bandwidth is only available to each sub-station, and from there is shared amongst all the users connected to it � the current average being around the 200 mark. Clearly not quite as attractive as I first thought. However, there are still a number of possible uses for this technology, and at least it might push BT into rolling out its ADSL service sooner rather than later.
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