Microsoft says Sun killed Java relationship

According to Microsoft senior VP Robert Muglia, Sun and Microsoft had a cordial relationship regarding Java development until Sun destroyed therelationship with a couple of key surprises. Among them was the surpriseannouncements of JavaBeans, a competitor to Microsoft's ActiveX controls,and Sun's rejection of COM, Microsoft's component object model for softwaredevelopment. Since then, the companies have been at each others throats andSun sued Microsoft in 1997 for violating its Java licensing agreement.

"[The JavaBeans] announcement hit me, my management, and our engineeringteams like a ton of bricks," said Muglia, who was the key player forMicrosoft in its Java licensing. "We had offered to license COM to Sun andwork in good faith to incorporate it into Java. Companies like IBM, Netscape, and Borland were at the conference announcing support and explaining how they would use JavaBeans. It was obvious that they had beenbriefed about the technology by Sun, and that Microsoft had been deliberately excluded from these briefings. Sun never mentioned JavaBeans to Microsoft until Mr. Baratz [president of JavaSoft] called me late in theafternoon on the day before JavaBeans was announced."

Muglia also said that Sun's surprise development of the Java Native Interface (JNI) in the Java Developers Kit (JDK) version 1.1 caused tensionbetween the companies.

"Because [JNI] is a native code C++ interface, it has no impact on developers writing programs in Java," Muglia said. "Microsoft knew that from a contractual perspective, we were not obligated to support Sun's definition and that only Microsoft had the right to define these interfacesin our [own JVM (Java Virtual Machine)]."

Muglia claims that Sun not only knew Microsoft was developing a JVM specifically for Windows but that Sun had openly agreed that Microsoftwould be able to optimize its own JVM for Windows.

"This point was not negotiable," Muglia says