Santa Clara, California-based Sun was responding to legal action brought by Azul in March in which Azul asked the District Court of the Northern District of California for protection from Sun’s claim to what Azul’s president and CEO Stephen DeWitt called exorbitant licensing fees.

DeWitt is a former Sun employee, having previously served as vice president and general manager for content delivery and edge computing after Sun bought Cobalt Networks Inc, where DeWitt was CEO, in September 2000.

According to Sun’s counter suit, DeWitt became CEO of Azul despite a non-compete agreement with Sun still being in force, and then set about hiring nine notable Sun employees, including Shahin Khan, formerly the head of Sun Microsystems’s HPC unit and its chief of marketing, to be Azul’s chief marketing officer.

Sun’s complaint alleges that these employees later made use of Sun’s trade secrets, for example detailing how it believes Chris Click, former senior staff engineer at Sun and now employed at the same level at Azul, presented information about Sun’s Sparc transactional memory/speculative locking technology as if it were Azul’s.

Sun also accused Azul of six counts of patent infringement related to transactional memory, data processing, chip communication systems, and software garbage collection, and asked the court for a permanent injunction against the Mountain View, California-based company as well as damages.

Speaking to ComputerWire in March, DeWitt denied any wrongdoing and maintained that Azul had offered Sun the opportunity to verify its claims via audits and confidential disclosures.

Sun continues to maintain a unilateral position, that having access to information that may change their position is not of interest to them, said DeWitt, adding that Azul has therefore filed for declaratory relief for the court to decide if there is an infringement case to answer.

In its countersuit Sun denied that it had rejected discussion on the verification of its claims and maintained that it was Azul’s refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations of discussions… and… provide any detailed technical information that had led the matter to court.

Throughout 2005 and into 2006, Sun negotiated with Azul in good faith to resolve the parties’ difference and to protect its technology, its lawyers wrote. Azul refused to respond in any meaningful way. On the eve of engaging in a meaningful exchange to evaluate Azul’s use of Sun’s trade secrets, Azul abruptly terminated negotiations by filing the instant declaratory judgment lawsuit against Sun.

In response to Sun’s countersuit, Azul’s attorney, Bob Haslam, maintained that it indicated the Unix vendor had backed down. Sun’s original set of allegations claimed an even longer list of patents and unspecified trade secrets than what is in their complaint filed today. This leads us to believe that we were right in seeking declaratory relief and we are confident we will prevail, he said in a statement.

Sun is correct that Azul spent the last year attempting to reach a reasonable resolution to the issues with Sun, but handing over a piece of the company was not then, and is not now, a reasonable resolution, he added.

Azul’s JVM is based on Sun’s HotSpot JVM but the company maintains that it is a Java licensee in good standing. The company was founded in April 2002 and worked in secret on its Vega processor and Azul Virtual Machine technology before emerging in September 2004 and beginning shipments in April 2005.

The Azul Compute Appliance has been specifically designed to support virtual machine environments like Java Virtual Machines, enabling users to mount the network-attached processing resource and offload JVM workloads on to the dedicated resources.

The network-attached processing model is being pitched as an alternative to the myriad of under-utilized general-purpose servers that have been deployed in recent years to handle Java-based application processing.