Gosling E-mail: Sun Is Screwing Up On Java Client Side

A Microsoft attorney Wednesday produced an e-mail in which Java inventor and Sun Microsystems Vice President James Gosling wrote that Sun's problems with Java on the client side are mostly due to the company's own neglect.

"We're really [screwing] up on the client side," Gosling wrote to Richard Green, Sun's vice president of developer tools, in an e-mail dated May 13, 2002, "mostly through neglect."

The e-mail was part of the second day of a preliminary injunction hearing here in which Sun is asking U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz to force Microsoft to put a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) compatible with the latest version of Java into Windows XP.

Microsoft Attorney Michael Lacovara produced the Gosling e-mail as part of a strategy to show that some of the problems with Java are of Sun's own making.

Lacovara pressed the point that the responsibility for Java platform fragmentation lies largely with Sun. "Whether or not Microsoft is 'acting unlawfully' as you put it," the Java platform is already fragmented due to the large number of Java run-time environments in the marketplace, Lacovara said.

Lacovara also showed the court a PowerPoint document bearing Sun's logo labeled "What Needs To Be Done" along with a subhead that read "We are still not competitive vs. Microsoft JVM." The Sun slide included several alleged issues with Sun's JVM including lack of stability, large footprint, and lack of awareness of OEM's product release schedules.

The e-mail from Gosling came into play when Lacovara was questioning Sun's third and final witness, University of Chicago Business School Professor of Economics Dennis Carlton.

Lacovara is attempting to debunk Sun's claim that Microsoft's anticompetitive acts and JVM distribution methods have given Microsoft's .Net an unfair advantage over Java.