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To: Keith Rowland who wrote (18122)	3/20/1998 11:16:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Yeah, Yeah Keith, Embrace and Demolish and all that. It's not exactly news for HP to side with Microsoft in something like this, they've been more or less in Bill's camp for a while. May be a pipe dream, but the dream has held together a lot longer than anybody credited it for in the beginning. Maybe you'd prefer "partnerships" like the Microsoft/OEM thing, where Microsoft treats them all like dirt, and they have to smile and pretend to like it? You think Novell is going to join Microsoft against Sun? I think you are purveying misinformation. I thought we learned this lesson with Unix. The wonderful unix standards committees brought us crap like Motif which is why Unix is suffering today. Gee Keith, you're the one who seems to be assuming nobody learned any lessons from unix, and the fragmentation thing is just going to repeat itself. With Bill and the PR minions behind the effort, it could happen, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. It's one front of the war that was declared Dec. 7, 1995. It's not over. Others wanting more details beyond Keith's snippy little summary can read news.com Hewlett-Packard (HWP) today announced plans to market its own Java virtual machine, and said that Microsoft has licensed the technology for its Windows CE operating system. Now, why is the purveyor of the best of breed Microsoft JVM and associated technology going off and buying a JVM from HP? I just don't understand. Cheers, Dan.

To: Keith Rowland who wrote (18122)	3/20/1998 11:55:00 AM
From: Thure Meyer	Respond to of 24154

"It is a pipe dream to think a group of companies (IBM, Sun, Novell, Netscape) can set Java standards when they are competitors of one another. I thought we learned this lesson with Unix. The wonderful unix standards committees brought us crap like Motif which is why Unix is suffering today." The problem with Motif has its roots in the overly complex X-11 concept. Which (in my opinion) is a very flawed approach to client/server computing. Any GUI sitting on top of X-11 would probably have turned out pretty much the same. So I don't think it was because of a committee. Standards bodies work reasonably well in general if you look at the IEEE, ITF, and others. I think that at the time the UNIX community was ignorant about the Microsoft/Intel challenge, believing that workstations and servers were somehow immune. A critique of X-11 and a different approach can be found in the Plan-9 project at Bell Labs (Thomson, Pike, ..) I agree that Java should not be under the exclusive control of SUN if it is the standard for "thin client" computing. The problem is that there isn't enough critical mass at this time and MS will do their best to poison the waters to make sure no critical mass is reached. Again, MS does not want open standards. They were reluctant to implement TCP/IP. In the first versions of NT only the partial protocol suite was included. This attitude extends to all the distributed systems management functions as well. Imagine for a minute what would happen to MS if Excell, Word and Powerpoint formats were put in the public domain or if MS were forced to implement CORBA. They simply wouldn't be able to compete on a level playing field. Thure

To: Keith Rowland who wrote (18122)	3/20/1998 4:33:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

[Hewlett-Packard Co (HWP - news) is to announce plans to market its own variant of Java software, breaking with Sun Microsystems] I had no idea HWP was working on this, but they've reportedly been at it for 18 months. One article compared it to Phoenix's "clean room" copy of the IBM BIOS that held up in court as legal and helped grow the PC clone industry enormously. The smaller footprint makes perfect sense for WindowsCE, and it's no surprise MSFT would be interested in Java from someone not suing and lobbying against them. One more big player buys in and it will get really interesting. Real competition in the Java VDM market. Fascinating.