DaveNet: Thursday, October 9, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Alex Chaffee on the Sun Lawsuit

From Alex Chaffee, alex@stinky.com:

So the big hubub the past two days has been Sun suing Microsoft.

In case you've been on a deadline-induced news blackout, here's a link:

http://java.sun.com/announcement/index.html

The lawsuit alleges 2 things:

1. Microsoft forgot to implement JNI and RMI, two esoteric but important parts of the Java core libraries

2. Microsoft altered several standard classes so that developers might think they were writing to the One True Java spec but actually their code would break on non-Windows platforms.

#1 has never been in question, but for #2, Sun never told us what the alleged alterations were. Without these facts, the whole story is just competing bluster between the public relations departments of our two favorite rivals.

So I wrote a little script, and found out. :-)

Bottom line: not a lot was added, and nothing was removed. Most of it was stuff no one would ever use unless they were porting the Java libraries -- which is, after all, what Microsoft was doing. I only found three classes where the changes were at all misleading.

However, I still think Sun was right to file a lawsuit, even if only as a PR maneuver. It may help the public understand just how important purity is to the Java platform. Without true write-once, run-anywhere, Java becomes just another OS-dependent application development language.

More details at http://www.stinky.com/java/.