Sun Microsystems Files Lawsuit Against Microsoft
Sun Microsystems Inc. opened a new front in the burgeoning legal war on Microsoft Corp. on Friday by filing a private antitrust lawsuit accusing the top software maker of illegally constraining the spread of the Java programming language and violating a host of monopoly laws.
The Palo Alto-based maker of computer servers and workstations filed the suit along with a request for a preliminary injunction in San Jose federal court. Sun general counsel Mike Morris said potential damages would reach more than $1billion before tripling, as permitted under antitrust laws.
The suit comes on the heels of a private antitrust suit filed by AOL Time Warner Inc.’s Netscape unit in January. Both cases take advantage of last year’s ruling by a federal appeals court that found Microsoft had used improper means to stifle Java and Netscape’s Web browser, which together could have threatened Microsoft’s monopoly on desktop computer operating systems.
Microsoft also faces a trial beginning March 18 in a suit by nine states seeking restrictions on the company’s behavior for its past misdeeds, as well as a raft of class-action suits by purchasers of its Windows operating systems.
Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said the company believed there was no legal or factual basis for the lawsuit.
Sun’s case is the most sweeping suit to date against the powerhouse from Redmond, Wash., but it is likely to take years to resolve. The preliminary injunction request could be ruled on within a year but will be harder to win.
Despite the wide range of allegations, the Sun suit has at its root some of the same facts as those in a narrower breach-of-contract claim it filed against Microsoft more than four years ago. That suit said Microsoft violated the terms of a license agreement to support Java, a programming language developed by Sun.
The judge who heard the earlier case determined that Microsoft appeared to have broken its word to Sun and misled the software industry into thinking that programs they wrote for Microsoft’s variant of Java also would run on other operating systems. Microsoft’s plan, according to e-mails from top executives, was to “pollute” Java to confuse and divide the market.
Sun settled that case by taking just $20 million but kept its right to sue again on antitrust grounds. It said the new case was more powerful because it placed Microsoft’s behavior in the context of its efforts to monopolize not just the PC market but the markets for server operating systems, Web browsers and office productivity suites.
“Microsoft sees these things as a whole, and it’s important for the court to view that as well,” Morris said.
The chief target of the case is Microsoft’s .Net framework for Web services, which will function like Java but tie still more Internet functions to Microsoft-based servers. That could hurt Sun’s hardware sales, Morris said.
“What they’ve tried to do is buy time for themselves to catch up to the Java platform,” he said. “The degree to which Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has damaged the Java platform concerns us.”
Sun asked the court to force Microsoft to resume shipping Sun’s version of Java in its operating systems and to disclose the secret protocols by which .Net communicates with Windows servers so that Sun and others can compete.
If nothing else, the case sets out a clear view of how the world looks to Microsoft foes. But a federal judge may be reluctant to revisit the Java fight, let alone use it as a springboard to reshape Microsoft.
“Unless Microsoft did something else new and egregious, which I don’t think is the case here, Sun is going to have a tough time getting the kind of sweeping remedies it wants,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group.
Shares in Sun, which on Friday reaffirmed sales projections for the quarter, rose $1.17 to $10 on Nasdaq. Microsoft, which had a good day in Washington federal court, rose $1.23 to $63.95, also on Nasdaq.
