On the opening day of JavaOne in San Francisco yesterday Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co were trying hard to play down the implication that HP’s ‘clean room’ virtual machine, might fracture the Java community. JavaSoft president Alan Baratz said he’d spoken with HP CEO Lew Platt after the company announced its VM on Friday and believes Platt has been misinformed about Sun’s intellectual property and license issues. Baratz said Platt told Sun that HP had no intention of breaking compatibility with Sun’s Java. Baratz said he thought it unlikely Sun would sue HP as they’re likely to come to some sort of accommodation. However neither company wanted to comment on the issue of HP’s compatibility with Sun’s Embedded Java APIs which the HP VM looks set to compete with. Designed for use in embedded applications, it’s already been licensed to Microsoft Corp for use with Windows CE. Baratz claimed we don’t know what HP is shipping, but we went down to the show floor and saw HP’s VM being used in an embedded environment to control robotic devices with digital video cameras attached. At issue is whether HP has implemented the Java specification in its entirety, as Sun’s conditions require. Third parties cannot implement a subset or superset of the Sun JVM, although they can license one of the three API subsets that Sun offers – EmbeddedJava, PersonalJava and JavaCard. HP hasn’t.
HP wanted different standards process for Java
Baratz said that in discussions HP appeared to balking at Sun’s license pricing. He said he’d agreed to negotiate on pricing if HP were to make up a payment in kind, possibly in the form of technology. However he said it became clear price wasn’t the issue and that HP’s problem was with Sun’s standardization route (though we can’t help thinking that’s what Microsoft would tell it to say). Sun is thought in some quarters to be bending ISO’s rules by putting Java through a standards process normally reserved for groups and organizations. He said HP wanted it to put Java through a more conventional process such as ECMA the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association or The Open Group. Baratz said Sun’s experience using these kinds of routes to try and standardize Unix showed theses routes to be very slow and not suited to its Java aims. Baratz said he was surprised when HP suddenly dropped the PersonalJava and EmbeddedJava license discussions last week. HP said it had told Sun it was working on its own VM eight months ago so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. However HP wasn’t able to say whether the VM is compatible with Embedded Java – specifications to which were officially unveiled today – even though it had seen early versions of the API work months ago. HP told us it hadn’t had time to look at the finished spec and that we should come back and ask it again today, Wednesday. HP said it has decided not to activate certain JVM functions such as database connectivity which isn’t needed in the embedded market and was working on enhancements for LANs, I/O and other mechanisms. It said it wouldn’t develop any additional Java APIs for the VM unless it creates a wider OEM base and gets input from customers.
