Appeals Court Sides With Microsoft On Java

burgburgburg writes "Reuters reports that the three-member federal appeals court in Virginia ruled today the U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz erred when he ordered Microsoft to include Java with the Windows operating system. Fortunately, Dell and HP, the top 2 PC makers, have already decided to ship Java on the PCs that they sell. Apple, Red Hat and Lindows have also agreed to include Sun's Java." The ruling is available.

actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

i think Red Hat includes IBM's implementation, and Apple uses their own impl.

Re:actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they are all based on Sun's Java.

Re:Yes, this makes sense

[jspectre]

ok. i agree with you in part. but M$ can also make it hard to install java and hard to make it compatable with their browser and OS. can you say "hidden APIs" anyone? and just when sun figures it out there will be an update/patch that will change things around again.

it doesnt matter anymore

[rexguo]

Well Sun has finally figured that it's futile to force M$ to include Java with its OS and has done a great job convincing the major PC makers to include Java instead. With the new logo and new website www.java.com designed for the average joe, Sun has finally decided to do something about its branding, and making Java a household name. The Christina Aguilera (sp?) promo was a smart move in collaboration with Motorola, but I feel the handset design was a disappointment. Sun may have lost the desktop war forever, but its enterprise presence (J2EE) is strong despite .NET's aggression and its mobile presence (J2ME) is way-ahead of WinCE/Windows Mobile. Nokia's debut of the first MIDP2 phone (6600) is a great win at this year's JavaOne. With its share prices dropping ~92% in 3 years, it's now going to be make or break for Sun.

Re:even SCOTUS can be influenced

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The counts were halted for specific counties that had not completed the counts yet. Suprisingly the counties in question had an unofficial lead for Gore.

Re:Yes, this makes sense

[deanj]

But that's what the lower court did!

At the time this was going on, Microsoft was still distributing their version. The courts response was, ship the compatible one instead.

The damage already done, Microsoft said "well, we won't ship any at all".

Fortunately, Dell and HP have already picked up the ball and will be distributing it anyway.

Re:actually,

[leifm]

Yeah, I thought that was the case as well. Doesn't Apple have the only Java implementation that doesn't spawn a new VM for each new app? I can't remember what the terminology for it was.

Re:actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anymore. RedHat will now bundle Sun's Java implementation. I believe there's a link to this on Sun's website somewhere.
At my client's site, they had a symposium with the chief technologist from Sun, Brian Wilson, a couple of weeks ago and he announced the agreement between RH and Sun.

wasn't the MS java "extended" java?

[dirk]

Maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn't the original problem that the MS version of Java had extra features that only worked on their version? It was compatible with regular Java, and would run all regular Java apps, but it had "extra features" that programmers could use that would make the Java app only work on their JRE. If this is truly the case, why would they have to include Java at all? They were originally told they couldn't ship their Java because it was "broken" (which having extra features is far from broken, not fair maybe, but not broken). So they decided not to ship a JRE at all and Sun sued because they weren't distributing Java at all. It seems when they were distributing a version of Java (although an "extended" one) Sun said don't do that. then when they decided not to ship Java if they couldn;t ship their version, Sun said they have to ship Java. They can't have it both ways. If MS's Java was compliant with the standards, but had extras, it was completely acceptable.

Re:Yes, this makes sense

[Fishstick]

>We can't (and shoudln't) prevent Microsoft from writing their own JVM

Well, Sun had something to say about it as Microsoft was violating their license with Sun, IIRC.

amemded complaint [sun.com]

In order to obtain the right to make and distribute products incorporating Sun's JAVATM Technology, and to mark such products with Sun's JAVA Compatible trademark, defendant Microsoft entered into two written agreements with Sun in March 1996. Pursuant to one agreement, defendant Microsoft promised to incorporate Sun's JAVATM Technology in certain products, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0, in a manner that fully conforms with and adheres to Sun's set of published specifications ("JAVA specifications") and "public" application programming interfaces ("JAVA APIs") for the JAVATM Technology.

Microsoft's prior agreements and promises notwithstanding, it has now unilaterally abrogated its obligations under both contracts by refusing to honor its express obligation to implement and adhere to Sun's most current set of JAVA specifications and JAVA APIs for the JAVATM Technology. Rather than comply with its contractual obligations, defendant Microsoft has instead embarked on a deliberate course of conduct in an attempt to fragment the standardized application programming environment established by the JAVATM Technology, to break the cross-platform compatibility of the JAVATM programming environment, and to incorporate the JAVATM Technology in a manner calculated to cause software developers to create programs that will operate only on platforms that use defendant Microsoft's Win32-based operating systems and no other systems platform or browser.

So yeah, Microsoft can and should produce their own JVM, so long as they adhere to the agreements under which they licensed the right to do so from Sun. Sun went to court to stop MS from distributing their version because it didn't meet the standards for compatibility that Sun had put forward in their contract. If they had just done this in the first place, no one would be crying about it now.

Someone please correct me if I've got this wrong.

Re:MS

[getling]

Yes, the ruling only partly strikes down the injuction; MS still cannot ship their own version of java, but they are not forced to include Sun's version.

In granting the mandatory injunction, the district court acknowledged that its "must-carry" mandatory preliminary injunction was unprecedented, but explained it was necessary in the extraordinary circumstances of this case to prevent future "tipping" from Sun to Microsoft in an emerging middleware market - a market for "general purpose, Internet-enabled distributed computing platforms" that is distinct from the PC operating systems market that Sun alleged was being illegally monopolized by Microsoft... Because the district court was unable to find immediate irreparable harm and because it entered a preliminary injunction that does not aid or protect the court's ability to enter final relief on Sun's PC-operating-systems monopolization claim, we vacate the mandatory preliminary injunction. With respect to the preliminary injunction prohibiting Microsoft from distributing products that infringe Sun's copyright interests, however, we conclude that the district court did not err in construing the scope of the license granted by Sun to Microsoft, nor did it abuse its discretion in entering the injunction. Accordingly, we affirm that preliminary injunction.

Such a poor decision ...

[Usagi_yo]

Alot of the people happy with the new decision have it wrong.

Microsoft wasn't being forced to carry Sun Java because Sun Java couldn't compete.

Microsoft was being forced to carry it as a remedy of past anti-trust practices of embrace, extend, then obscure.

DC Circuit Court

[raistphrk]

I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to sue Microsoft in a federal court under the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Microsoft WILL win the case, regardless of its merits. Microsoft has dominated that Circuit Court; the judges have such a bias in favor of Microsoft that you're practically shooting yourself in the foot by using said district. You sue, perhaps win, perhaps lose, the case goes to appeal, and you DO lose. And given the Supreme Court's unwillingness to review cases, that pretty much puts an end to your action.

A better strategy is to sue in a court under the juristiction of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth has repeatedly shown technical know-how and a willingness to embrace and extend technology, though certainly not in the Microsoft sense. The bottom line is, don't sue if it's obvious you're going to lose from the start.

Re:actually,

[Steveftoth]

No, they still spawn a new VM for each new app, you can't get around that limitation. Too many of the core classes are coded in such a way that you cannot get around that. (it's because of the static member variables)

However, Apple's vm is basically sun's VM with some enhancements. First of all there's the Java-Cocoa(Objc) bridge that lets a developer write a java backend with a Obj-C native Cocoa front end. Secondly, the feature you may have heard about that saves much time and reuses code is that the VM caches on disk the HotSpot compliation of the Java byte code. The way it works is that Java code is compiled to JAva byte code by the developer. The VM then compiles byte code to it's own internal representation for eventual compiliation to native code. This code is normally intrepreted, but when a section of code is 'hotspotted' it is then compiled to native code. Apple modified the vm to save the internal representation of the bytecode to disk and use this in the VM. This is automatically done for all core classes at install time and on the fly for other Java code.

Sun is supposedly looking into a way to extend it to other applications. Though only in client application does this make much difference because in server applications classes don't get loaded a lot. (except for JSPs but you really shouldn't be doing cpu intensive stuff in the JSP code, but in a library function)

Re:actually,

[shawnce]

Apple's implementation does start up a new JVM instance for every applet/application but the JVM's all use shared code and loaded jar instances. So it is like starting up a new task which links against the same set of shared libraries/frameworks as other tasks.

Additionally Apple provides, by default, installations of 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 in a fixed and standardized location, generally following the deployment style other the frameworks provided on the system. They are also updated automatically as needed via the normal Apple Software Update process, just like any other framework/application/etc...

They go out of their way to discourage application developers from installing their own JRE's, it is not needed, it wastes space, and actually could lead to compatibility issues (the JRE they install could be in compatible with the OS version installed, etc.)

Apple tests and maintains correct versions of their JREs for you, they are considered as part of the OS. This is very nice. Why should Java be different then any other OS framework?

I do find it funny that it is worded as saying that Apple has "also agreed to include Sun's Java". Apple goes out of their way to provide Java on Mac OS X, its Apple's JVM/etc. implementation not Sun's.

Re:actually,

[SashaM]

I don't know what Java Plugin you're using, but Applets already run all in the same JVM for all Browsers and JVMs I know. The problem is with multiple applications in the same JVM, which expect everything to close down when System.exit() is invoked (and other sharing issues). See the RFE on this issue [sun.com]

Re:actually,

[Golthar]

Sun is working on this issue together with Apple and are in the process of merging their code.
At first they expected it in 1.4.2, but because the code is not stable yet, they haven't released a new date

Java chat on 1.4.2 [sun.com]

*snip*

Filip: Startup performance is better in this release, but you only achieve about 1.3.1 startup performance with 1.4.2. Is there going to be some work in the Tiger release to further speed up startup? Also, why is shared VM dropped from 1.4.2, and can we expect it in Tiger?

Ken Russell: We are planning to make more startup improvements in 1.5, but cannot provide specific details at this time. We are continuing to work with Apple Computer to develop and integrate their VM sharing code, but can make no guarantees about its future availability in Sun's J2SE releases.

*snip*