Who Supports the War(s)

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Tobiasly
Is Coke required to include a can of Pepsi in every twelve-pack they sell?

That's a lame simile. Coke never agreed to include Pepsi in every future twelve-pack during some hypothetical time when it was to their advantage to do so.

MSFT's bad-faith dealings with the Java licence created a situation where the market for Java support was structured around support being included in the OS platforms. MSFT even signed up to "implement the reference platform" for Java on their OS....which they actually did do, for a while.

When they finally twigged that Java would actually achieve a reasonable level of platform independance--something they undoubtedly thought impossible--they panicked and started looking for ways to poison the well--including that whole charade over at ECMA. They couldn't find one that worked well enough without completely violating their original contract, which they proceeded to go ahead and do figurung "Neener, neener, neener, we're MSFT and we can afford more lawyers than you can, by the time we're done in court we'll have crushed you like evrybody else."

I think Sun is perfectly right to insist on the remedy bringing them closest to "specific performance" of what MSFT originaly agreed to: develop a JVM to Javasoft's spec and distribute it with their OS platform, along with very specific compatibility requirements (which forbade extensions except in certain highly controlled ways, which MSFT flauted completely). and they are now throwing a tantrum and sulking because they haven't gotten their way. Since they can't be trusted to develop anything for Java without poisoning the well, Sun will develop for Windows and MSFT can bloody well distribute it as they agreed to.