Microsoft Told to Carry Rival’s Java Software
Handing Sun Microsystems Inc. a big victory, a federal judge in Baltimore ruled Monday that archrival Microsoft Corp. must distribute Sun’s Java programming language with the ubiquitous Windows computer operating system.
U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz said his decision to grant a preliminary injunction was needed to roll back “market conditions in which [Microsoft] is unfairly advantaged” over Sun, a Palo Alto-based maker of computer servers and workstations.
His ruling could cost the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant tens of millions of dollars in repackaging and distribution costs.
The decision means that Motz believes that Sun is likely to prevail in its $1-billion antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, which will go to trial sometime late next year. It also signals that Motz is confident there is a substantial likelihood of irreparable financial harm to Sun if Microsoft, whose Windows software controls more than 90% of personal computers, does not distribute Java in the meantime.
“We are very gratified by the court’s decision,” said Sun special counsel Michael H. Morris. It “is a huge victory for consumers who will have the best, latest Java technology on their PCs, and it is a victory for software developers who will write applications to run on those PCs.”
A spokesman for Microsoft said the company would appeal the ruling.
“We are disappointed, but we are still reviewing the details of the court’s opinion,” Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said.
The case, filed this year, is one of four private antitrust actions that are pending in federal court against the software powerhouse, and it is the most sweeping in scope.
Java is a general purpose computer programming language whose small size and flexibility has made it popular on the Internet, where it is used to power some pop-up Web ads as well as more sophisticated computational applications.
Sun’s attorneys had argued that Java had been losing out to Microsoft’s .Net programming language, which provides a framework for Web services such as electronic commerce, because Microsoft refused to widely distribute the Sun software. The .Net language is designed to function like Java but tie more Internet activities to Microsoft-based servers. That could hurt Sun’s hardware sales, company executives maintain.
But Microsoft’s lawyers and the company’s supporters argue that a majority of the world’s software developers already use Java, even though the product has been faulted for not being as fast and robust as some Microsoft offerings.
“I think this sets a terrible precedent when a judge says that a competitor has to ship an inferior product,” said Jonathan Zuck, head of a Microsoft-backed trade group in Washington called the Assn. for Competitive Technology.
In his 42-page opinion, Motz said Sun “is entitled to the presumption of irreparable harm and the protection against the harm which a preliminary injunction affords.”
He added that if Microsoft should prevail in the marketplace, “it should be because of .Net’s superior qualities, not because Microsoft leveraged its PC monopoly to create market conditions in which it is unfairly advantaged.”
Sun’s lawsuit follows a private antitrust suit filed in January by AOL Time Warner Inc.’s Netscape subsidiary, which created the first popular Web browser. Both legal challenges seek to capitalize on the Justice Department’s 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft.
As part of that case, a federal appeals court found that Microsoft had leveraged its Windows monopoly to stifle Java and Netscape’s Web browser.
At their peak in the mid- and late 1990s, the two products were viewed as significant threats to Microsoft’s dominance of desktop computing software.
The Justice Department’s pursuit of Microsoft formally ended last month, when U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly approved the agency’s settlement with the company after considering and rejecting a request from several states to force Microsoft to bundle Java with Windows.
Since the government’s antitrust lawsuit began in 1998, Microsoft has successfully battled hundreds of private antitrust claims, getting many of them thrown out of court on grounds that the plaintiffs -- mostly consumers who bought Windows -- had no standing to sue.
But some legal experts say Motz’s decision may be an indication that the tide is turning against Microsoft.
“This is a significant victory for Sun,” said Andy Gavil, an antitrust expert and law professor at Howard University in Washington. “The ruling does indicate some degree of conflict with what Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled” last month. The ruling, which was announced after the markets closed, sent Sun shares up 31 cents, or about 10%, in after-hours trading. They had closed at $2.96, down 5 cents, in regular Nasdaq trading.
Microsoft shares rose 96 cents to $54 in regular Nasdaq trading. They dipped slightly before recovering in after-hours trading.
