Microsoft Corp may be preparing to take Sun Microsystems Inc to court over the WABI Windows Applications Binary Interface that SunSoft Inc is expected to bundle with Solaris x86, the new Solaris-on-iAPX-86 operating system, sources tell our sister paper Unigram.X. It is said that Sun’s SunSelect, the unit that picked up WABI when it acquired Norwood, Massachusetts-based Praxsys Technologies Inc, has already received a letter from Microsoft complaining that WABI violates its intellectual property rights. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has already made similar complaints in public to the US press. Microsoft wants Sun to pay a licence for WABI, specifically $50 a copy, and has been saying so to Sun since at least December. At a meeting in January at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington with Sun vice-presidents Eric Schmidt and Carl Ledbetter, Microsoft executive Paul Apritz told them that they faced a business decision. You’ll have to compare the cost of staying current with us and defending litigation against the cost of paying us royalties. Apritz also promised to make Windows such a moving target that Sun could not keep up. WABI is expected to be announced as a product on May 5. At the introduction, Unix System Laboratories Inc will likely be trotted out as a key WABI partner, providing a direct conduit to Univel Inc, its joint venture with Novell Inc, as well as an implicit conduit to the Common Open Software Environment. It is believed that Sun and Unix Labs, which are said to recognise the potential hiccups with WABI, may try an advanced game of one-upmanship with Microsoft, putting AT&T Co’s patent portfolio, containing such things as Backing Store, in the balance against Windows. SunSelect has repeatedly maintained that Microsoft doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, and that it will not pay the licence. It has said WABI was created in a clean room, an argument that some sources say implies there was a dirty room somewhere. Sun’s other weak point may be the fact that WABI’s Praxsys creators come from BIOS house Phoenix Technologies Ltd, where they would have had access to MS-DOS, although Phoenix was one of the pioneers of the concept of the clean room, where no-one that has any inside knowledge of the code being emulated is allowed to come into contact with the developers of the emulation. At that same January meeting, Apritz tried to sell Sun on the notion of putting Windows NT onto its Sparc RISC. He told Schmidt and Ledbetter that Sun, ICL Plc and Fujitsu Ltd ought to do it defensively for the insurance. The price was between $250,000 and $500,000 for the source code and a royalty of $100 to $200 a copy in royalties, enhancements included.
