September 22nd, 2004
Sun-Microsoft collaboration progress report
You might recall that in April of this year Sun and Microsoft reached détente on their formerly adversarial relationship. Under the terms of the 10-year pact, Microsoft will pay Sun nearly $2 billion to resolve antitrust and patent issues. The companies are also paying royalties to use each other’s technology. I talked to Greg Papadopoulos–Sun’s CTO andlead executive setting the agenda for the relationship along with Bill Gates–and asked him about progress so far in the technical collaboration.
“We have a lot of stuff going on, and we have been more public with developments around network identity, Web services stacks and the relationship between the Java and .Net stacks. We have committed to certifying our hardware and storage for Windows—not as a reseller of Windows, but in the broadest sense. For example, we have a hot two-processor Opteron workstation that would be a dream for [Windows] XP developers.”
“We are looking for the pain points and for points of gratuitous incompatibility that should be solved by Sun and Microsoft. We can do many things that require relatively little engineering but have a high return for customers. For example, it’s not necessary for us to have different representations for roles in access control [solutions]."
Papadopoulos also noted that Sun has been supportive of XP Service Pack 2, making sure that Java and Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite run well with the extensive security-focused service pack.
Popadopoulos isn’t revealing anything specific indicating that Sun and Microsoft will ensure that Java and .Net interoperate seamlesslessly. For developers that have to accommodate both software platforms interoperability between Java and .Net at different layers of the stack is critical. “Watch this space,” Papadopoulos told me. “We have some opportunities to innovate that will allow developers to draw from both worlds.”
The two companies are collaborating on some Web services specifications, including WS-Addressing and WS-Eventing.
Clearly, some progress has been made, but it would be useful to have roadmap for the technical collaboration rather than dribbles of information. It could be that Gates and Papadopoulos haven’t yet reached agreement on how to proceed on the big issue of .Net/Java interoperability…
