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To: EPS who wrote (24075)	11/3/1998 2:55:00 AM
From: EPS	Respond to of 42771

BOTTLING JINI By Owen Thomas Red Herring Online November 2, 1998 LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA -- "Nothing would make us happier than if a fistfight broke out in the lobby," said Tony Perkins, editor-in-chief of the Red Herring, in his opening address at the Herring's NDA '98 conference, held in a San Diego hotel. He also urged the crowd of 400-plus CEOs to "get naked." The geeks at Sun Microsystems (SUNW) took both suggestions to heart. Chief Scientist John Gage and head of research Bill Joy came out swinging in a morning presentation focusing on Jini, Sun's Java-based networking technology. What's so magical about Jini? "It just works," said Mr. Joy. Jini promises to let devices ranging from PCs to servers to smart cards discover other devices located on the same network, without the need for configurations, drivers, or directories. The PC revolution has created more than a trillion dollars of wealth, according to Mr. Joy, but he expects the revolution of networked devices with embedded processors to create and redistribute considerably more wealth than that. Bazaar battle However, Jini is more than a networking technology to Sun: it's another staging ground for the battle for developers that the computer maker and inventor of Java is waging with Microsoft (MSFT). Following the lead of the Linux operating system and Netscape's (NSCP) browser in publishing the source code that underlies software, Sun plans to open up Jini for modification and expansion by outside developers. The licensing model is called community source: Jini will be available to tweak and hack for free, but commercial applications will require royalty payments. More specifics will be announced in January, but for now, Mr. Joy expects those royalties to be no more than $1 or $2 per consumer device sold. "Community source is like open source, but with more responsibilities: you have to pass compatibility tests," said Mr. Joy. With Java, compatibility has been a headache for Sun; the company is now embroiled in a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming the software giant violated the terms of its Java license with Sun. "The situation with Microsoft is like the United Nations with Iraq there's this one-sided refusal to submit to inspections," said Mr. Gage. Think of it as evolution in action For his part, Dan Rosen, Microsoft vice president and general manager of new technology, wants to stay above the fray. "I don't think it's likely that there's a revolution afoot," he said. "I think it's an evolution." He argues that while developers want to enable existing applications for networks, the PC will remain the dominant computing environment for most people. "The post-PC world is going to be a lot like what we have now, but better. The thing that people forget is that we have hundreds of thousands of developers writing [PC] applications that add value to the end user." Drawing the lines Microsoft Research is also developing a networking technology called Millennium. While Millennium shares many of Jini's goals in essence, hiding the complexity of networking for applications developers and users a summary of Millennium shows where Microsoft and Sun diverge. The authors of the Millennium paper say that performance gains can be realized by "eliminating unnecessary boundaries between the operating system and the application" the same philosophy that has led Microsoft to bundle its Internet Explorer browser into Windows. Mr. Gage and Mr. Joy, for their part, argue that there must be a clean layer of separation between applications and the operating system, and point to Microsoft Windows' burgeoning size and complexity in the absence of this separation. Sun and Microsoft have drawn the battle lines over the future of networked operating systems. Jini is just the latest sally.