New documents reveal the underbelly of the Sun-Microsoft Java battle
zdnet.com
In a Fall, 1996, e-mail to Sun Vice President, Jon Kannegaard, David Spenhoff, then-director of Java product marketing, wrote: "Microsoft were smarter than us when we did the contract. They did contemplate that our interests in evolving the platform would conflict with theirs, and they put language in place that not only protected their interests but also inhibited our ability to drive significant new functionality that is not purely bolt-on to the existing Java Classes.
Sun: We were out-negotiated
"What I find most annoying is that no one at Sun saw this coming. I don't think our folks who negotiated and agreed to these terms understood at the time what they meant," Spenhoff wrote.
Spenhoff, who has since left Sun, contended that, according to the contract, Sun could not use Java classes to add new functionality to Sun's Java Developers Kit without Microsoft buying in.
"Who knows what this might mean beyond Java Beans?" he wrote. "Code signing? RMI? Native Methods? Anything that does not bolt onto JDK 1.0.2? Lots of other stuff, I bet -- In the absence of comprehensive compatibility test suites, Microsoft de facto owns the definition of Java Compatible."
'We're in violation of the MS contract'
Sun product manager Eric Chu agreed with Spenhoff, according to an e-mail cited by Microsoft. "This substantially limits our ability to introduce new technologies since almost all new technologies require a new class," Chu wrote.
"In addition, our attempt to introduce the new category Extensions might not work simply because the definition of Supplemental Java Classes is very very broad. In summary, I believe we're in violation of the Microsoft contract and our attempt to re-class things as Extensions [a proposal of Kannegaard's] will have limited success," he wrote.
Microsoft also portrayed Sun executives as being fearful of Microsoft after they saw a demonstration of Microsoft's Java technology in May, 1996 -- two months after the contract was signed.
"The really scary thing about the meeting was how much effort they're putting into it," said an unatributed e-mail cited by Microsoft. "They're not using our VM at all, they're using the one that they wrote from scratch, along with our class files. The clause in the contract which requires them to send source back (which they're happy to do) isn't going to be real useful since it bears no relation to ours ..."
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