SAN FRANCISCO — Now that Microsoft and Sun
Microsystems have settled their legal battles, the
companies say
they are looking forward to a better relationship between .NET and Java.
As part of their $1.95 billion legal settlement, the two companies will
allow certain intellectual property to be shared, starting with Windows
Server and Windows Client, but will eventually include other important
areas, including e-mail and database software.
But after so many years of playing in opposite sandboxes, there are some
critical technical issues yet to be addressed. Think of it not as a
marriage,
but as serious dating, say the CEOs of both companies.
“We’re not going to — we shouldn’t say ‘never,’ but there’s no plans to
merge C# with the Java language, or .NET with the Java Web Services
architecture. But we are going to work hard to find ways — in the
appropriate manner,” Sun CEO Scott McNealy said during a press
conference here.
Both men pointed out that the 10-year agreement will be a boon for
customers and for IT managers that have to deal with heterogeneous data
centers.
“There’s a level of interoperability, I think we both know people
want,”Ballmer said. “I
actually think with this agreement announced there will be more customer
feedback that will help [Sun CTO] Greg [Papadopoulos] and Bill [Gates]
shape exactly what else customers might want in terms of the way they target
our .NET platform as well as Sun’s Java platform.”
The companies said engineers from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun and
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft will now cooperate to allow identity
information to be easily shared between Microsoft Active Directory and the
Sun Java System Identity Server. While the two platforms have had a working
ability to interoperate in the past, that’s been mostly though reverse
engineering by Sun.
“We’ve had to guess at the protocol, and so some features don’t quite work, especially when it came to security and identity management,” Sun
Software CTO John Fowler told internetnews.com. “For example, some
developers working with J2EE had to program to Tuxedo. With SIPs [session
initiation protocol] especially, there were workarounds for authentication
and security administration. Now we are working on removing some of these
barriers.”
While both sides said it was too early to speculate on which issues would
be
addressed first, Ballmer and McNealy both agreed that the teams will now
seek guidance from customers to prioritize and figure out which company’s IP
will be the foundation and who will have to enter into a software license.
“We’ve never had any kind of patent regime between our two companies,”
Ballmer said. “We are both big developers of intellectual property. We both
own lots of patents.” He said it was impossible to create a
technical collaboration framework without having a corresponding IP
agreement so that both companies could be assured their IP would be
protected, and the legal teams spent about as much time on that issue as it
will take the technical teams to collaborate.
Daryl Plummer, group vice president for emerging tech and trends at
Gartner, says his intuition says cross licensing on desktop and server
technologies makes sense, although at the core, he expects C# and Java will
remain separate.
“The differences between the .NET platform and J2EE are big enough that
it still makes sense to have them both. Java and C# will continue to grow
individually,” Plummer told internetnews.com.
Sun has also agreed to sign a license for the Windows desktop operating
system communications protocols under Microsoft’s Communications Protocol
Program, the result of Microsoft’s anti-trust
Settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Likewise, the companies have
agreed that Microsoft may continue
to provide product support for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine that
customers have deployed in Microsoft’s products. This reverses a point of
contention that was the basis for Sun’s original 1997 lawsuit against
Microsoft.
Sun and Microsoft say they will also certify Windows for Sun’s lineup of
Xeon servers and eventually its Opteron-based servers.
As for a buy-in by developers, Sun CTO Fowler said there are those camps
that
will not be pleased about Sun’s collaboration with Microsoft. McNealy said
he felt it would not cause a migration to alternative platforms like Linux,
but rather draw more developers to the two companies’ platforms.
“The fallout is, if customers like this, that’s what attracts
developers,”
McNealy said. “Developers want volume. And so, if this attracts more
customers,
it’s going to attract more developers.”
What has yet to be determined is how Sun will use the infusion of almost
$2 billion in aid of its goal of getting back to profitability.