[ Thanks to James E.
LaBarre for this link. ]
“The settlement of Sun’s lawsuit against Microsoft over Java
this week ends any hope that the programming language will act as a
platform allowing software to be written once and run anywhere, as
Sun chairman Scott McNealy once envisioned.”
“In addition to Microsoft’s paying Sun $20 million, the parties
agreed that Microsoft’s Java license will terminate and that
Microsoft won’t use the Java trademark in any new products.
Microsoft can sell existing products using older Java
versions–Microsoft calls its version of Java “J++”–but agreed not
to modify the software beyond bug fixes.”
“Java will likely have a strong future, but as a Sun-controlled
platform used mainly on Sun’s own servers, with third-party tools
enabling it to run on other vendors’ systems, analysts said. But
Java will be just another computer language, like C or Visual
Basic. It will have nowhere near the ubiquity and revolutionary
effect that Sun envisioned when it released the software…”