Are Sun and Microsoft forming an unholy alliance?
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The Internet went all abuzz last week when a report by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posited that Microsoft was keeping open its legal options against licensees of OpenOffice.
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Microsoft and Novell officials this week defended their controversial business agreement to collaborate and promote integration between Windows and SUSE Linux. But many of those at The Open Source Business Conference remained skeptical.
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Calling Hewlett-Packard âthe most comprehensive partner we haveâ among a list of over 640,000 such partners, Microsoft announced this evening, along with HP, the formation of a joint marketing alliance, in which both companies would jointly market Microsoft software implemented on HP hardware.
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Microsoft and Sun Microsystems on December 1 will deliver a joint update on their collaborations pursuant to an April 2004 technology-sharing agreement to boost interoperability between the two vendorsâ products, according to a Microsoft representative on Wednesday.
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It's ironic that Microsoft could help further cement its dominance in the browser market by joining its largest rival in an effort to support web standards. &nbsp;At the same time, that act would go a long way towards improving the web in general for developers and users alike.
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Unthinkable a year ago, perhaps, but there are currently indications that Microsoft is starting to think about identity management systems in terms of interoperability. A meeting  later this month with vendors and other organizations such as the Liberty Alliance promises to be productive.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building servers with one-time foe Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system installed directly inside of them, instead of forcing customers to install the ubiquitous software on their own or defect to a competitor for one-stop shopping.
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A RED HAT vice president has slammed Sun for refusing to open source its Java code and hanging on like grim death to its patents. The bone of contention is the April agreement between Sun and Microsoft.
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Do mobile application developers need to band together to tackle the tough issues facing them? Attendees at Sun's Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday afternoon will briefly discuss this issue.The idea is that developers must deal with issues such as fragmentation in features, behavior, security policies, and deployment policies and could form an alliance providing a single voice, said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community."We call it the mobile developer alliance and it's essentially a developer activism group," Barr said on Wednesday evening. "It's just a grassroots thing. We haven't thought about it too much. The idea is to bring developers together to give them a common voice and try and work on some of the fragmentation and issues that the industry has."The mobile developer alliance is envisioned as an industrywide effort and not Java-specific. Developers, Barr said, have not had a consistent, uniform voice in facing issues.Among the problems developers face is having to slightly rework applications for each of the many phones, Barr said. Every phone, he said "has certain quirks that you have to deal with, and if you're trying to cover 80, 90 percent of the installed base out there it becomes very painful because you're literally producing hundreds of slightly different versions of the same application," he said.The alliance could serve as sort of a citizens' voice, but the exact mode of operation is still up for discussion, Barr said. Agreement on high-priority issues that developers want to make progress on would be a main focus, as well as trying to establish relationships with players such as carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)."It's not necessarily [about] battling your enemies but it's about getting everybody on the same page," said Barr. No single player can address them, he said."At the end of the day, [developers] are the ones who have to make all this stuff work," he said.OEMs care about the platform and carriers care about the networks, said Barr. "The developer has to bring all these pieces together and that's why it's so painful," he said.Sun officials Wednesday also talked about Java ME (Micro Edition) development tools, including plans for a Java ME development toolkit with a consolidated environment for both the CDC (Connected Device Configuration) framework and CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) technology.Also highlighted were enhancements planned for the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CDLC. Planned features include an application testing framework and support for Java Specification Request (JSR) 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to the JCP (Java Community Process) and JSR 280 - XML API for Java ME.The application testing framework is intended to automate manual testing. It will support refined testing scenarios in an emulated environment as well as improvements for testing of applications for users with visual, motor, or dexterity impairments.JSR 256 offers a unified way of managing sensors connected to mobile devices and easy access to sensor data. JSR 280 is designed to provide a general-purpose XML API for next-generation mobile devices.
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Anything but Microsoft As the tenth anniversary of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice acquisition approaches it grows increasingly difficult to fathom what Sun intends for its suite.â¦
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SCO group is going down. Microsoft, Sun, and the greedy investors that abetted SCO in its campaign to loot Unix and Linux vendors and their customers have abandoned ship. Microsoftâs public endorsement of SCOâs legal action against, effectively, Microsoftâs enterprise competitors and their customers, gave SCO the leverage to mug said vendorsâ customers for license fees when vendors refused to drop their wallets in court. Sun and Microsoft animated SCO as the prototypical litigious IP boogeyman in order to terrorize competitorsâ customers into switching to Windows or Solaris to avoid being hauled to court. Thatâs how I laid it out in 2003, and I stand by it now.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
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SAN FRANCISCO - As Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ready an early December unveiling of the first step in their highly publicized technology collaboration, industry observers are questioning whether the former foes will fail to address industry standards, particularly the work being done by the Sun-backed Liberty Alliance consortium.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Datacomm White PaperFind out how Crate & Barrel expects to save $180,000 by moving to VoIP, compared to a traditional PBX.
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Three years ago, we attended Sun&#39;s quarterly network computing day. It was the heart of the Bust, and we were treated to pot shots directed at IBM and Microsoft and were told that Sun was the true &quot;open standards&quot; vendor.
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In for the big win Having recently rediscovered itself as a systems company, Sun Microsystems has been welcomed into Microsoft's vast and growing family of OEM partners.â¦
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. has found one more way to cozy up to users of Microsoft Corp. products without actually shipping the Windows operating system on its computers.