DaveNet: Tuesday, October 21, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Sun & Microsoft Worked Together

From Christian Jacobsen, xtian@eng.sun.com, an engineer at JavaSoft, a rebuttal to a segment of Microsoft & Restraint from earlier today that said:

> Good question! If they had paid me $15 million for the
> license, I would treat them like a customer, and see how
> I could work better with them. I remember that the
> customer is always right. It would take me a very long
> time, a lot of phone calls and meetings one-one before
> I would file a lawsuit against a customer.

Sun & Microsoft Worked Together

"In the quote above, it sounds like you are implying that we did not try to resolve the issue with Microsoft amicably, and just hauled off and hit them with a lawsuit. I personally spent over three weeks in meetings, on conference calls, and reading/writing email with Russ Arun of Microsoft to try and iron our issues out in a reasonable manner.

"Russ has had a long and good relationship with us, and he and I have always been cordial and friendly. We respected each other and worked with each other to try and find a mutually agreeable solution to the issues we were working on. We worked every angle of these particular problems for weeks to try and find a solution.

"Unfortunately, in our last conference call Russ and I finally had to concede that we were at a technical impasse: they wanted to be granted a variance on (or have us change) something that we could not allow. He and I agreed that these issues could not be resolved through technical means, and so therefore the issue became a legal one. We thanked each other for our efforts, and then said goodbye.

"This is a small part of the whole lawsuit issue, but it does show that Microsoft and Sun have worked together to try and resolve this issue in a friendly manner. This did not come out of the blue."