Microsoft to Cut Java to Spite Sun (fwd)

[John Whitfield]

>| By 1/1/2004, Microsnot will have expunged Sun's Java 
>| completely from all of its machines and OSs for sale.
>|
>| No word on whether they spit in the antitrust judges' face at 
>| the same time.
>
> Well, one could argue that this will  be  an  improvement.   
> Over  at slashdot.org,  they've  had  a  discussion of the 
> issue, in which the main point seems to be that MS's  JVM  is  
> years  old  and  not  very compatible with anyone else's.

Hmm.  That raises an interesting question.  Is Microsoft intentionally including their old Java to preclude OEMs from including the current version?  As I understand it, even the deal they struck with the DOJ includes allowing OEMs to load their own software.  If Microsoft just dropped Java, the OEMs could just load in the current version.  If they leave their lame version in place, they could claim that it had to be left there.  Sort of like the way the "complied" with the order to remove IE by making a version of Windows that didn't boot.

> More generally, one could argue that an OS shouldn't 
> "support" any specific packages at all . . . Sorta like how 
> unix was designed to work back in the 70's ...

Or DOS, for that matter.

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