Quote:
Originally posted by Tobiasly
OK, I'm admittedly fuzzy on all of the history leading up to now.. what do you mean when you say Microsoft "signed up" to implement Java in their OS...
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They signed a contact with Javsasoft (the division of Sun in control of Java) to be permitted to include Java tech in Windows and to be the developers of the reference JVM implementation for Windows. Sun gave them total access to source code, and developers all over the planet did many man-years of development work relying on MSFTs promise that a compliant JVM would ship with every copy of Windows.
When MSFT realized--years down the road--that Java was actually beginning to deliver on its promises of platform portability, they decided the contract wasn't such a good deal for them after all and began to put code into their JVM to break compatibility: there would be one way to code some things for Windows and another way everywhere else. This was explicitly forbidden by the licence agreement.
Sun began beating on them to comply with what they'd promised to do in the licence agreement, and MSFT refused saying what they were doing "worked better".
When Java released Remote Method Invocation (a technology underlying J2EE and EJB), a means of calling code in another JVM or in another machine across a network, Microsoft saw a looming threat to the future dominance of their own DCOM technology (a .NET predecessor), because RMI works across *all* platforms, not just Windows. They flat out refused to implement it in their Java support as they had comitted to doing many years before--their contract called for them to imlement new revs of the Java API within a specified time limit after the Java platform was revved by Sun, and thier imlementations were required to pass compatibility test suites written by Sun...the same tests required of all other Java implementors. .
I think requiring MSFT to ship Sun's Java implementation with Windows is a suitable remedy for the damages calculatedly and deliberately caused by MSFT's bad-faith breach of the contracts they freely entered into.
By the way, Radar? I was working in computing before you were born..so your "17 years, you've been schooled" riff impresses me not at all. So you can sit down too, "little boy."