By Siobhan Kennedy
Sun Microsystems Inc vice president, James Gosling said yesterday the company never had any reason to presume its relationship with Microsoft would end in a nasty letter from a lawyer. Speaking to a US government’s attorney, Tom Burt during his cross examination in Washington Thursday, Gosling said that Microsoft could have come to Sun with a proposal about how to integrate its technology into the Java language, but it never did. Burt showed the court an email from Dean McCrory, a senior in Microsoft’s Java development team, Jakarta, to Sun’s Scott Rautmann. In it, he claimed Crory told Rautmann about their plans to integrate core Microsoft COM and OLE technology into the programming language. I’d like to have a contact at Sun where we could send our ideas/specifications/whatever to get your feedback, Burt read aloud from the email. Later, the attorney said to Gosling: No one ever responded to that email did they? Gosling replied: The evolution of Java is controlled by a process. We work as a community. It’s not a case of where one person unilaterally makes a change and everyone else decides whether or not to go with it. It was a major problem for us that Microsoft decided to go off on its own. He added, we believed that Microsoft understood that was how it worked. We assumed people were being honorable. We had no reason to presume that this would require us to send a nasty letter from a lawyer. But Burt insisted that Microsoft tried in vain to initiate discussions with Sun. In an email from Sun’s Eric Schmidt to various Sun employees, including Gosling, Burt highlighted a line where Schmidt said of Microsoft: They are willing and interested in collaboration with us in the areas of COM integration (ie Active X), 2D and 3D APIs, and Java Network Management. But Gosling said: As it [Microsoft] was holding out its hand, there was a knife in the hand and they kept expecting us to grab the blade. Gosling said Microsoft was only willing to discuss solutions that solved the problem for its own platform, running its own JVM. It happened time and time again, he said, with COM, with the packaging format, with the debugging format, and we were feeling very frustrated. We wanted to co-operate if only Microsoft would offer our number one goal of portability and interoperability. Throughout the morning, Burt went to great lengths to prove that Microsoft had in fact, acted within its contractual obligations to Sun, despite that fact that a federal judge in San Jose, California has already ruled that not to be the case. Later, in a press conference, Microsoft spokesperson Mark Murray said the morning’s hearing was greater evidence that Sun had an unfair double standard when it came to Java compliance. He said that Sun’s own internal documents clearly showed the company was concerned about the consistency of its relationship with Microsoft, in the light of concessions it was making to the likes of Spyglass, Netscape and others for not achieving compliance across the board. But the government’s lead attorney, David Boies, disagreed. He said Gosling’s testimony served to underline the key actions Microsoft took to prevent Java from gaining widespread acceptability. Namely, bundling its non-compliant, non-portable version of Java into its web browser, Internet Explorer (IE); bundling IE into its OS; distributing tools that did not permit developers to have the same opportunities to develop on a cross platform basis and ultimately violating the contract that Microsoft had entered into with Sun by implementing a version of Java which was not in keeping with Sun’s original specifications. Gosling’s testimony is expected to last to the end of the week.
