Sun Launches Antitrust Lawsuit Against Microsoft

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

This is not the first time that these two parties have met in court to fight about how Microsoft misappropriates Sun's Java technology and uses anticompetitive business practices to beat Sun in the application development and runtime market. Sun is now in the midst of an antitrust lawsuit in the courts of the Europe Union (EU), where Sun is alleging that Microsoft has illegally used its monopoly over desktop operating systems to take over the market for server operating systems. This is undeniably true, but then there is a question of whether or not it is illegal. That is something that EC Commissioner Mario Monti is sorting through right now. Monti has the ability to impose fines on Microsoft equal to 10 percent of its worldwide revenues if it is found to have broken European antitrust laws, so it comes as no surprise that last week Microsoft offered to open up its CIFS file system protocol and Kerebos security protocol to make it easier for non-Microsoft operating systems to interoperate with Windows desktops and servers.

More to the point, Microsoft and Sun have been in and out of court in the past five years concerning a breach of contract in Microsoft's licensing of Java technologies. Sun accused Microsoft of adding proprietary extensions to Java that essentially undermine the application portability of Java, and Sun prevailed in that case to get Microsoft to stop altering Java. Of course, the ultimate result was that Microsoft decided to rip Java out of its Windows operating systems late last year, beginning with the Windows XP release of its desktop operating system. Perhaps more significantly, Sun claims that Microsoft has hijacked many of the ideas behind Java and JVMs to create its .NET frame work, its C# programming language, and its Common Language Runtime.

To Sun's way of thinking, Microsoft has removed support for Java and stolen all of the ideas behind Java to create an incompatible, Microsoft-centric version of Java that we all call .NET. This is not what Sun's complaint says in plain English, of course, but this is truly the heart of the matter that has forced Sun to resort to legal action rather than market competition to fight Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that Java is not an open standard, but one controlled by Sun through its Java Community Process, and in many ways Microsoft's CLR is a more interesting and pliable runtime environment than a JVM, in that it supports many different languages. If Java were an open standard, certified and voted on by standards bodies that includes rivals like Microsoft as well as allies like IBM, then Microsoft and other vendors could have suggested opening up Java and adding CLR-like features to it. Sun once wanted to put Java through the standards process and truly make it an open standard, but it pulled back on that two years ago when Pat Sueltz jumped from her job as IBM's Java czar to run the software business at Sun. The world would be a different place if stubborn vendors like Sun would let go of standards like Java and Microsoft could participate in their evolution through a truly open process. Sun makes a few hundred million bucks a year licensing Java and related technologies, and it has gotten a tremendous amount of PR out of controlling Java. It simply doesn't want to give this up, and in this regard its behavior is as unacceptable as is Microsoft's attempts to undermine Java over the past five years.

Mike Morris, Sun's general counsel, will be handling the Microsoft lawsuit, and he said in a conference call last Friday that Sun's top brass would not be distracted by the case, which was entirely in his hands. "We believe we have a compelling case, and we look forward to our day in court," he said. "We believe that Microsoft's goal is to establish choke points on Internet access using only Microsoft technologies," he said explaining his case. Sun contends that Microsoft deliberately fragmented the Java platform, flooded the market with incompatible JVMs, forced other (and unspecified) companies to distribute or use products that are incompatible with Java, significantly limited Sun's distribution channels for Java applications and middleware, intentionally interfered with the development of Java applications, infringed on Sun's copyrights by distributing an unlicensed implementation of Java, and intentionally created incompatibilities between Microsoft software and competing technologies (namely, Java), thereby raising the cost of moving applications around and reducing consumer choice. (This latter item is always a big thing in these antitrust cases.) Sun admits that many of these actions took place in the past, but their effect has jeopardized the careers of millions of developers who have learned Java technologies and have stifled competition in the market for tools and applications. "What is at stake here is the future of an open software industry and an open Internet," said Morris.

Sun is seeking treble damages and attorney's fees, which is standard in U.S. and California antitrust law. Sun is also seeking preliminary injunction that forces Microsoft to put Java back into Windows XP and Internet Explorer and stop forcing customers to add a JVM to these environments through a separate download. Sun, in a mood to ask for the moon and the stars, has also sought a permanent injunction that requires Microsoft to disclose and license its Windows interfaces and to unbundle Internet Explorer, Internet Information Server, and the .NET framework from Windows. Sun thinks it has a pretty good shot at the preliminary injunction, and it hopes to have a hearing on it within a year.