MS and Sun return to court in Java dispute

By Alun Williams

Posted on 4 Apr 2003 at 12:23

Microsoft yesterday asked a US court to overturn a previous legal injunction to include Sun's Java runtime with the Windows operating system.

Both parties faced a panel for the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. It was a hearing on Microsoft's appeal of a lower court's preliminary injunction requiring Microsoft to carry Sun's Java technology.

Microsoft was orginally forced to carry Java and said it would begin shipping an updated version of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP (one that included a more current version of the Java runtime environment from Sun). Microsoft, however, successfully overturned this decision.

The original case involves Sun suing Microsoft for $1bn over the allegedly inferior version of Java shipping with the Windows OS and IE browser. Sun alleged that Microsoft was attempting to discredit the platform-agnostic system in favour of Microsoft's own more proprietary .Net framework.

The Java runtime system is the technology that allows Java programs - which in theory are platform neutral - to run on a specific platform. The concern of Sun was obvious: with Windows being a dominant operating system, the success of Java (in part) will rely on its acceptance by Windows-based desktops and IE browsers.

For those brave souls wishing to retrace the full course of this legal dispute, check out the following stories: Microsoft counters Sun over Java dispute, The Windows Java runtime dispute runs and runs, Sun bids to shut out MS Java appeal, and Microsoft given three months to ship Java

The origin of the case leads back to that other long-running legal dispute between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice (under the Clinton regime) and 18 states. Sun's case is just one of a number of suits that sprang from the ruling of a federal judge that Microsoft had indeed acted in a monopolistic fashion, given its Windows dominance of desktop computer operating systems.

Microsoft has settled the anti-trust dispute - having to publish the APIs of Windows subsystems, allow third party applications to be installed with Windows and to change its practices when dealing with OEMs - but it is now facing the consequences of actions brought off the back of that initial ruling.