As company lawyers trooped off to federal court in San Jose, California, to open a breach-of-contract battle against Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems chief Scott McNealy issued this letter to the troops about the coming battle over Java:
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 09:55:16 -0700
From: Scott.G.McNealy@Corp (Scott McNealy)
To: allsun@Sun.COM
Subject: UPDATE–SUN'S JAVA LICENSING AGREEMENT & MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER 4.0 RELEASE
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SUN PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL USE ONLY
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I would like to update you on the situation regarding the release of Internet Explorer 4.0 and our licensing agreement with Microsoft.
Due to the results of our Java compatability tests, Sun has filed a lawsuit today in San Jose Federal Court against Microsoft for the following reasons:
- Trademark infringement, false advertising and trademark delution under federal law.
- Unfair competition and false advertising under state law.
- Breach of contract and inducing breach of contract.
- Interfering with prospective economic advantage.
All causes of this action result from what we believe to be Microsoft's clear breach of our two licensing agreements signed in March of 1996 with the recent release of IE 4.0:
- The technical license, allowing for the use of Java.
- The companion license, which allows for the use of our trademark.
These are similar to the agreements signed by 117 other partners who deserve our diligence in protecting what is Java.
This is an extremely important development for our company, one which we reluctantly accept as our responsibility, due to Microsoft's action regarding the Java licensing agreement. We know that many of you will have questions and concerns about this issue. Additional details can be found at the URLs at the end of this message; and look for a Special Edition of the McNealy Report.
We all have pretty clear jobs to do, here. This is not some holy war. Your responsibility and my responsibility is to our customers, to our shareholders, partners, and the industry's developers. To maintain our strong momentum we have got to execute like crazy. This is a distance race, folks. We'll make sure you know what is happening.
As a reminder, please do not answer press inquiries - refer them to your local public relations staff. If you are not sure where to refer media calls, send them to Lisa Poulson x51630 at JavaSoft, or Susanne Vagadori x88281 at SMI.
Scott
