When US District Judge Ronald Whyte ordered Microsoft to make its products more compatible with Sun's version of Java, the Redmond ego appeared bruised. After a good night's sleep and a closer look at the decision, Microsoft says the ruling will have little effect on its strategy.
"We had a more negative initial reaction than was justified," said Tom Button, Microsoft's director of product management for development tools. "We've now had 24 hours to understand the ruling ... and we've found that it will have a negligible impact on our development strategy. What the judge issued was very mild compared to what Sun was asking."
On Tuesday, the company's lawyers sang a different tune, going so far as to suggest the court ruling could end Microsoft's support of Java.
"The option of not supporting Java is open to us," said Microsoft's Tom Burt, associate general counsel in a telephone conference after Tuesday's ruling. "And we are considering all our options."
Under the ruling, Microsoft is not required to recall any products. But it must alter code within its Java Virtual Machine that includes Sun's Java Native Interface. Microsoft said it had tweaked that part of code to optimize the software's performance on Windows.
"This is a relatively theoretical requirement because we don't think [developers] will write to JNI," said Button. "Since they already decided to write application-specific code -- so there's no benefit to writing to JNI -- it's an inferior way to write Windows code. Being required to ship [JNI] just means more bytes on a disc, and we can comply with that."
Whyte ordered Microsoft to stop shipping development tools for Java unless they are modified to be compatible with Sun's version of the Java platform.
