San Francisco - Sun Microsystems Inc. offered to waive the licensing fee for use of its EmbeddedJava Virtual Machine (VM) if Hewlett-Packard Co. would in return agree to use Sun's JVM rather than releasing a competing version of its own, Alan Baratz, president of Sun's JavaSoft division, said at the JavaOne show here yesterday.
HP refused because it does not like the standards-setting process Sun follows to implement changes in the Java technology, Baratz said, speaking during a question and answer session with the journalist after a keynote speech he delivered here earlier. [See "JAVAONE: Sun to Focus on Java's Stability, Performance," March 24 ]
HP on Wednesday said it has developed its own embedded Java VM, which is used to run Java programs in devices where little memory is available, such as printers, fax machines and pagers. The company plans to install it in printers and other products this year, and will market it aggressively as a competing product to Sun's, HP officials said.
The announcement sparked controversy, with suggestions that HP's Java VM, which HP says was built from scratch using no Sun technology, might be incompatible with Sun's and could thus derail Java's "write once, run anywhere" promise.
HP said at the time it chose not to license Sun's Java VM because Sun's licensing fee is too high, and because the product will not be ready soon enough to meet HP's needs. Sun today announced a draft specification for its EmbeddedJava platform, the final version of which is due late this year.
Baratz said that as recently as last week he offered to waive the licensing fee altogether if HP would license Sun's embedded JVM specification. He said he would have asked for some payment "in kind" in return, such as technology support in an area in which HP has expertise.
HP officials refused the offer because they said they do not like the process Sun uses to set new specifications for Java, Baratz said. HP wanted Sun to use a "traditional standards process" in which all decisions are reached through consensus by an open working group, Baratz said.
Under Sun's current system, which has been approved by the International Standards Organization, Sun engineers oversee the development of Java specifications, then submit them to Java's 140 licensees for comment. The comments are acted upon "as necessary," and the technology is then posted to the Web for a period of public comment.
Licensees collaborate on the specifications being developed, Baratz said. For example, EmbeddedJava includes input from Motorola Corp., Texas Instruments Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. But where disagreement arises, final decisions always rest with Sun, Baratz said.
"In our experience we've found that there needs to be a decision-maker in the group, otherwise the process breaks down," Baratz said.
Sun officials have yet to see how HP built its Java VM. Sun, however, expects the two companies' products to be compatible, and does not suspect HP has violated any patents that underlie the JVM technology, Baratz said.
The only requirement of licensees of Java technology is that they implement Sun's full specifications without subsets or omissions, Baratz said. Companies that do not license Java cannot use any of Sun's Java technology to build products, he said.
RELATED LINKS
Network World Fusion, 3/23/98.
EmbeddedJava overview
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