Hewlett-Packard today added four more companies to the list of licensees of its specialized Java Virtual Machine for embedded devices.
The company said four vendors of real-time operating systems have licensed its embedded virtual machine: Integrated Systems, Lynx, Microware and QNX. The original licensee for the virtual machine was Microsoft, a company already under attack by Sun for developing an incompatible, Windows-centric version of Java.
"This is the next logical step so we can deploy to developers," said HP's director of marketing, Byron Ryono. "We can get a lot of mileage from these license agreements.
HP also said today that Intel is working on the first "high-end implementation" of an embedded virtual machine that would run on top of embedded Pentium processors.
The companies licensing HP's Java have operating systems targeted at specialized computer devices. These include various telecommunications products, consumer electronics, and other devices with limited memory and cost constraints.
HP says its virtual machine provides a flexible, functional platform for companies developing software for these devices.
The move widens the gulf between Sun and HP over the development of Java and its various standards for specific environments.
Sun would like to keep HP from moving forward with its own implementation before Sun has established a standard. But ever since Sun was sanctioned as the overseer of the Java standards process, HP has taken issue with the company's control, accusing it of not being open and participatory. HP would prefer that the standards process for Java be handled by a body similar to the one that oversees Web specifications, the World Wide Web Consortium.
"It has to be a vendor-neutral group like a W3C," Ryono said.
Sun spokeswoman Elizabeth McNichol declined comment on today's news, but said that the important thing to Sun is that HP has promised that its virtual machine will conform to the Java specification established by Sun's standards process so far. "They've been strongly committed to staying compatible with the published specifications," she said.
As for Sun's process being open and neutral, McNichol pointed out that the International Standards Organization, which approved Sun's role as Java's standard bearer, had intensely scrutinized the process and deemed it open.
