Sun and Microsoft Make Nice 152
DrLudicrous writes "Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have reached some kind of settlement (NYTimes, registration required) with regards to patent issues and Sun's antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft is apparently going to pay Sun about 1.6 billion US dollars, join into a ten-year pact of cooperation, and resolve a set of patent disputes. This has been in the works for about a year, starting as a series of phone calls between Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer. You can also catch the story here." update oh well, it's a duplicate. Nothing else interesting happening today :)
Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like it loses 400 million dollars a day though, so pretty soon Sun'll be paying a huge wad of cash over to Bill...
Simon
Re:Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:2)
Phew... im glad to see im no the only one having deja vu!
Re:Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:1)
I was kinda thinking slashdot was a bit late on this, then I remembered it wasn't
Re:Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:3, Funny)
Not 100% a dupe, we have more info today. (Score:5, Insightful)
For example:
Interviews [com.com] where they explicitly say that they wouldn't have done the deal except that it puts pressor on IBM.
That "Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back."
that Forrester [forrester.com] somehow thinks this is good for Sun - I bet he thinks the SCO/MSFT partnership's good for SCO too. It's sad to see Sun turn into just another SCO. Can I get a "+1 Sad" mod?
Re:Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:2)
Billions and Billions... (Score:2)
Re:Damn deja vu. Where's that cat ? (Score:1)
Old News. (Score:2, Funny)
First they ignored, then laughed and are now assimilating.
What effect will this have on Java? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What effect will this have on Java? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What effect will this have on Java? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't see how conspiry theory's are marked interesting.
Java is to big to be killed, and it's the source for a lot of money for Sun. This will actually help both C# and Java because you can write in either language and compile into either Java Byte Code or MSIL (Microsoft's Byte Code). This will also help the Mono project out and make Eric Raymond's group's job a lot easier.
Java will also get more support on Windows.
Re:What effect will this have on Java? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now java is a big beast, but Sun never let it go. IBM has fully invested in Java and Sun could burn the java house down just to screw IBM. I don't know that you could kill java but you could severely damage it and give it that "bridge to nowhere" look. That's what MS did with OS/2, they simply out spent IBM and made it lo
Re:What effect will this have on Java? (Score:1)
Work on your history (Score:2)
Not open sourcing Java a part of the agreement ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting rid of an open sourced Java opponent is i.m.h.o. more valuable to MS than the 1.6 G$ settlement fee.
Just my 0.02 $....
Sun + MS + SCO == Friends forever and ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can live in denial, or you can just accept that MS and Sun is going to turn on linux and Free Software in general.
Brought together by a common enemy.
Sure, MS will dispose of Sun sooner or later, but after they've done how much damage?
Re:Sun + MS + SCO == Friends forever and ever. (Score:2)
SCO + Sun + MS = SCuMS
Re:Sun + MS + SCO == Friends forever and ever. (Score:1)
Re:Sun + MS + SCO == Friends forever and ever. (Score:1)
Re:Sun + MS + SCO == Friends forever and ever. (Score:1)
I would be surprised if they suddenly turn on Open Source after all these years of support and development.
Linux does compete with Solaris, but not so much at the top end. The nice cuddly chaps at Sun have been more than happy to promote open source on the Desktop. In fact Open Office is and has been crucial to Open Source being competitive at all on the desktop.
This settlement was necessary for Sun because they were loosing money, a
Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone better start holding AMD under a little harder, before they lose the whole market.
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:2)
Intel isn't in this for "Art for Art's sake". They don't mind if AMD makes processors as 1337 as the old Alpha chip, so long as people spend most of their money on Intel.
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:4, Insightful)
I fear that Microsoft is just trying to keep some token competitors around for the sole purpose of avoiding antitrust claims, while at the same time making sure that their "competitors" cannot actually threaten their entrenched monopoly position.
E.G. they get to rake in all the cash benefits of being a monopoly, while still being able to point to "competitors" which cannot actually threaten their monopoly position any longer and which simply protect them from antitrust complaints...
All the while, while faced with anemic "competitors," they could then claim that they do have competition but that they remain in their position because their products are "better."
In spite of deals like the one with AOL/Time Warner to use IE instead of Netscape/Mozilla, when IE is a total piece of crap (it has the worst security record of any web browser, period). Hell, I still remember being scandalized the first few times I heard about holes in IE that could lead to total compromise of a system. The worst I remember for any other browser offhand is the possibility of leaking cookies or weaknesses in their cryptography and such, none of which are even remotely comparable...
Oh well. There's not a damned thing I can do about any of this monopoly business, but ever since I started teaching basic internet courses to the community here, I've been able to at least tell them where and how to get Mozilla [mozilla.org], and why they should never, ever use the piece of crap that is IE
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:1)
Re:Steve needs to keep Scott alive, yesss (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft needs to keep Sun alive (Score:1)
Apple was practically dying before MS step in with their investment. This is different from AMD's case.
Sunset (Score:2)
Re:Sunset (Score:2)
Linux clients won't be able to talk to the Sun backbone and Linux servers won't be able to talk to the Windows clients.
Microsoft and Sun decided to carve up the pie among the two of them, leaving IBM/Linux out.
A little behind (Score:1)
Money, money, money... (Score:1)
Microsoft pays SUN big bag of cash.
What's next?
Re:Money, money, money... (Score:2)
Microsoft pays SUN big bag of cash.
What's next?
Phase three: Profit!
Re:Money, money, money... (Score:1)
Microsoft pays SUN big bag of cash.
What's next?
Me, I hope. But reality tells me I shouldn't get my hopes up too high
Re:Carrier Command love fest (Score:1)
Microsoft pays SUN big bag of cash.
What's next?
They made me think of a bit of Shakespeare (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that Microsoft is in danger of going down the tubes anytime soon, but this has been a real pain in the neck for them and they're better off not having to combat the
It's sad to see what kind of shape Sun is in lately, but maybe they'll be able to focus on being a business instead of a party to a cancerous lawsuit.
New "Patent Regime" is a threat to open source (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what open source project will suffer first as they enforce these patents? Mono? JBoss?
Re:New "Patent Regime" is a threat to open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has patents on stuff that Open Source uses, has patents on stuff Sun is using, etc. And the other way around.
The cost of lawsuits is too expensive, esp for little details like an icon or what not. But companies (Eolas for having a page get information from another server?!) are created just to create items that Microsoft has not
Re:New "Patent Regime" is a threat to open source (Score:2)
Re:New "Patent Regime" is a threat to open source (Score:3, Insightful)
I would be really surprised if this isn't Microsoft's new way to take on open source projects that threaten their business. Sure, Mono, but also Linux in general. Their sponsorship of SCO was just the beginning.
MS has found that sometimes, they cannot win from open source projects on their products' merits alone. FUD isn't working as well as it used to either. And their monopoly position and the use they make of it
Re:New "Patent Regime" is a threat to open source (Score:1)
The road to Redmond goes through Mountain view (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft would rather have the battle on Sun's turf- even if that means keeping Sun alive! I think the two will fight open source with patents.
Sun and Microsoft could have partitioned the 1.6 Billion in any way they saw fit. They put the bulk of into into Licensing patents. Not so much for damages from viol
According to Maureen O'Gara (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
This agreement recognizes that cutting edge R&D and intellectual property protection are the foundation for the growth and success of our industry.
This can be read: "MS loves SCO's thinking."
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft could have just waited Sun out.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
wanna bet??? Sun had saved stuff from the shredder [sltrib.com] and had the real dirt on them... what's the bet's this settlement also involves Sun quitely destroying the real evidence that Microsoft would definitely not want seen dragged into open court...
I just wonder if IBM will be putting in a court order to rescue them from Sun's shredder...
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Oh goody! (Score:1)
Come on, people! (Score:1)
It seems to me that about 25% of the front page articles are either reposts or just plain wrong.
Have there been some changes to the editorial staff?
I'm sorry, but ... (Score:1)
Re:I'm sorry, but ... (Score:1)
Seriously, though; the amount of dupes seems to have suddenly shot up recently.
You get what you pay for I suppose....
For 1.6 Billion... (Score:2, Funny)
heh (Score:2, Funny)
update: oh well, it's a duplicate.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
CmdrTaco: Hello, My name is CmdrTaco, and I am a duplicate addict.
All: Hi CmdrTaco!
HA! HA! (Score:1)
As long as you're reading a dup.. (Score:2)
It's worth a gander.
OOo (Score:2, Funny)
What free office suite? (Score:1)
Re:What free office suite? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"they settle, now take on Linux" (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see the Chinese giggling right now. They've been copying MS disks for years and distributing them for free, despite government lip service RE shutting the counterfeiters down. Now the West is going to step on i
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"they settle, now take on Linux" (Score:1)
shoulda bought sunw stock last week (Score:2)
Then again, everytime I've bought the stock, I've watched it halve in value.
Seriously, though, if I could use ms-office docs on a Sun, then I might go back to having a Sun on my desk. (No, staroffice isn't there yet. Close enough for hand grenades, but not for effective collaboration with ms-office users.)
Scary (Score:3, Interesting)
If McNealy thinks that getting in bed with Microsoft is going to give Sun a leg up over Linux, then there are going to be some very annoying times ahead.
SMC can only blame itself (Score:5, Insightful)
While Sun has had decent hardware, it wasn't better than SGI or HP. They were stagnant on the user side of innovation. There is no reason why Sun couldn't have developed a KDE or Gnome type UI (although I was mostly happy with Openlook...) They had years of warning in advance of MS who didn't really have a network interface until 1995ish and they failed to exploit it.
On the server side, they may have been the last *nix company to start bundling commonly installed GNU/OSS software in their distro like perl and bash.
In the 90s, McNeally is on record as saying if he had been Bill Gates, he'd have done the same stuff, referring to the business practices of MS.
The workstation manufacturers like SGI and Sun blew their chances because they used expensive, custom hardware and charged by the pound and were very slow to innovate from a user perspective. They targetted science, research, and graphics shops that could afford their hardware, because at the time it was the best performing. As soon as Intel and AMD caught up in hardware, and Linux and MS with the OS, their advantage disappeared quickly.
Sun will be remembered no differently than Netscape or Real, who blew their chances by stagnating. Don't get me wrong, MS's business practices are shameful, if not illegal, but the real problem is that MS was allowed the opportunity to catch up.
enemy of my enemy is my friend (Score:1)
three envelopes (Score:2, Insightful)
The first envelope was marked: "Open after a weak quarter". Inside was a slip of paper that said, "Bash Microsoft at every opportun
Auto Karma maker.... (Score:3, Funny)
SELECT commentTitle, commentText FROM comments WHERE Storytitle="Sun and Microsoft Settle Litigation" AND moderation = +5
OPEN C1
FETCH NEXT from C1 into
While (SQLCOD==0){
postNewComment(Title,Text);
FETCH NEXT from C1 into
}
CLOSE C1
Try to think positive, sigh. (Score:3, Informative)
I guess were in for an eclipse.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any company that has partnered with MS seems to have been either bought by, or hindered by things like this. EG: Netscape -> gone for all intents and purpses, and while mozilla lives on, the market share is small. Real.com -> While they are still around, who uses real over windows media player or quicktime? Corel -> yeah they are still around, but didn't MS dump its stock in them? Mac -> MS owns part of Mac, or at least last time I checked they did.
My guess is that Sun and MS would play real nice in Windows services for UNIX, of course I just use cygwin and don't pay for more MS licenses.
Just my 2 cents.... I know Sun is in trouble and they are probably doing this as a last resort, to save money.
This is garbage news (Score:2, Interesting)
They are going up fight in the sales trenches just as they were before. Only difference would be the CEOs talking less trash.
I can see it now... (Score:2, Funny)
What is the world coming to. Next thing you know, someone will tell me Microsoft is selling Linux
Microsoft is selling linux!!! (Score:1)
What does this mean for: (Score:2)
What does this mean for Sun Java Desktop Linux?
What about Sun StarOffice, or even OpenOffice for that matter? I know it's officially OSS, but OpenOffice1.1 now has the Sun logo on the startup banner, so it's there for a reason, right?
Something about this gives me the jumblies.
*This* could be a dupe? (Score:2)
IE 6 for unix???? (Score:1)
Sun Also cuts 9% of it's work force (Score:2, Informative)
10 years? (Score:1)
This article is ridiculous (Score:1)
Sun and Microsoft: what it means for open source (Score:3, Interesting)
consider that both Sun and Microsoft are SCO supporters, I mean, licensees.
The real news is that SUN is bleeding money incessantly. If you read their published quarterly results and know a bit about accounting, you will realize that rather than use the settlement money as a one-time payment to offset current losses, they plan to spread it out over a number of quarters to pad future potential loses. This shows that Sun has very little faith in its own future.
From a cnet.com article on the same subject:
"For its fiscal third quarter, which ended Sunday, Sun expects revenue of $2.65 billion and a net loss of $710 million to $810 million, or 23
cents to 25 cents per share. The loss includes charges of about $350 million for an increase in the valuation allowance for deferred tax assets and about $200 million to restructure its work force and real estate, Sun said.
Excluding the charges, the loss would have been $200 million to $260 million, or 6 to 8 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thompson First Call was less pessimistic: a loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $2.85 billion.
The company says it has more than 35,000 employees worldwide, so the layoffs account for about 9 percent of its work force. The job cuts will affect all divisions and geographic areas, McGowan said. The majority of cuts will take place by the end of September, he added. Sun already had cut 8,500 employees in two major layoffs in 2001 and 2002."
I give Sun about 5 more years before it's bought out. Only saving grace would be if everyone got fiberoptic lines to their homes in the next few
years and they could rent you app space in their sun-rays servers for a few dollars a month. Somehow I don't see that happening...
And Java won't save them unless they turn it into the defacto language for desktop apps, which just isn't likely to happen.
For further reference on the Sun-SCO relationship, read this piece by David Berlind.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/m ai n/Could_Sun_hold_...
For SUN's initial SCO FUD, read this among many of the articles that they put out:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,20000617 33
It is obvious to anyone that cares to look that Sun is between a rock and a hard place.
The reason they called the Java Desktop System (JDS) by that name is so that they can switch from Linux to Solaris and continue to call it by
the same name, which is what they intend to do.
People really need to understand that Sun ain't no friend of ours. They opensource StarOffice to spite Microsoft and the community around Openoffice has built something that would have taken Sun years with more than 40 supported languages, more than Office, and another 35 in the works. SUN began to offer Linux servers because customers demanded it, simply because they did not want to be tied into a proprietary OS with proprietary hardware.
If SUN's management had some brains, they would focus on hardware, placed their bets on Linux and put Solaris in maintenance mode for those
that really want to run it. I still believe that Solaris is a very good OS for some very limited scenarios, but how will it compare to Linux
one, two, three, four and five years down the road?
On the long haul, Sun will be wasting a ton of resources that they could be using to build services higher-up-the-Linux stack. They could also improve their hardware and face the other real challenge that they are going to have a hard time facing: Inte
Here's a non dupe you can use (Score:1)
http://www.japan.com/technology/index.php
TECHNOLOGY
The Techno Maestro's Amazing Machine
Kohei Minato and the Japan Magnetic Fan Company
A maverick inventor's breakthrough electric motor uses permanent magnets to make power -- and has investors salivating
More at the site, it's quite interesting. Note: permanent magnet motors aren't new, his has a different twist to the
Re:Here's a non dupe you can use (Score:1)
Wishful thinking (Score:1)
Department (Score:1)
So what are the chances of Sun moving to Windows? (Score:2)
If sun can make expensive and highly specialized Windows servers that no other maker can make, no longer be an enemy of MS, and kill java they could win.
Remember Microsoft made WindowsNT portable on purpose in an order to kill Unix and attract the vendoers. The first version of WindowsNT was made on an SGI workstation for the mips processor.
Sun has the most fault tollerant systems besides IBM mainframes. They could keep their nitc
Yep, add Sun Microsystems ... (Score:1)
Sun finally faces the truth they've been denying (Score:2)
Sun was arrogant and just refused to see that the commodity hardware was going to catch them and destroy their server business. The 64 bit x86 chips spell the end of SPARC. McNealy never built a services business or a software business that wasn't tied to his platf
Errrr....that's not Java it's Linux.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm certain the author in the Washington Post article is refering to "Java Desktop System" which is the name of a Linux distribution.
The earlier comment the author makes:
Linux-based systems, marketed by IBM and others, have made strong inroads in the corporate-systems market. So far, Sun has been the primary victim, but Linux has provided more competition for Microsoft than has any software in years.
Leads me to believe that he doesn't realize Sun are also involved in Linux as an OS (not just providing applications such as the StarOffice suite).
Python+WebWare+Cheetah vs. .NET and Java? (Score:2)
python [python.org] replaces java
webware [sourceforge.net] replaces servlets
cheetah [cheetahtemplate.org] replaces velocity
i've just started using python, haven't even cracked open webware or cheetah yet - but conceptually, at least, these seem quite similar to their counterparts.
i suspect the java-based stuff is faster, scales a lot better, has more libraries, and is more mature - but the P+W+C might grow to fill that void,
World War III (Score:1)
Sun microsoftsystems (Score:1)
Re:Is this a Dup or is Slashdot now just behind (Score:1)
Slow day guys?
Re:Mplayer on AMD64 (Score:1)
I got it to emerge mplayer cleanly in 64bit mode this week, and it is reporting that sse2 is being used, so no problemo.
Try it again soon - I suggest building from source (but it sounds like you are doing that anyway). Which distro are you on ?
Re:HEY TACO (Score:2, Insightful)
I see your low
But that's just like my opinion man.