Microsoft Corp is battling Sun Microsystems Inc's request to regulate its business practices just a month after the world's largest software maker won court approval of its antitrust settlement with the US government.
Sun Microsystems wants a judge to order the inclusion of its Java programming language in every copy of Microsoft's Windows XP as a penalty for Microsoft's illegal efforts to discourage Java's adoption by software developers. Putting Java in Windows operating system software would increase competition for programs that power Internet-linked computer networks, Sun says.
Legal experts say Sun will have difficulty persuading US District Judge J. Frederick Motz to implement the proposal, which was already rejected by another federal judge in the government's antitrust case. Motz will convene a three-day hearing in Baltimore to consider evidence supporting Sun's plan.
"It will be very difficult for Sun to prevail," said Ernest Gellhorn, who teaches antitrust law at George Mason University in Virginia. Motz is likely to tell Sun "another court has already looked at it and declined to go as far as you like."
Still, Sun might persuade Motz if it can show that Microsoft's illegal defense of its Windows monopoly inflicted harm on Java and its refusal to carry the programming language in the operating software would cause "irreparable harm."
In granting Sun a hearing, the judge said the company raised "serious allegations that irreparable harm might be suffered. I have an obligation to take it seriously."
The end of the government's lawsuit "psychologically gives Sun a hard road," said Eleanor Fox, who teaches antitrust law at New York University. "Theoretically, Sun has a clean starting place; it starts from square one," she said.
US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington, who last month approved the settlement of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft, rejected most of the requests for tougher remedies by nine states that had joined the US government's antitrust suit. The states's proposals included requiring Microsoft to include Java in Windows.
In her Nov. 1 opinion, Kollar-Kotelly ridiculed a Sun executive's testimony for the proposal as "little more than an attempt to advance Sun-compliant Java technologies through this proceeding."
The executive, former Vice President Richard Green, is among four witnesses Sun says it will call during the hearings before Motz.
Motz has already ruled that Sun and other plaintiffs in private lawsuits may cite as evidence the trial court's findings in the US government's antitrust case. These include findings that Microsoft pressured software developers not to use Java.
The judge in the government's case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, also found that Microsoft regarded Java as a threat to its monopoly because programs written in the language would run on rival operating systems such as Linux and Unix. Microsoft squelched competition from Netscape Communications Corp because its Netscape Navigator Web browser distributed the Java Virtual Machine, which decodes the programming language, Jackson found.
Sun argues that Microsoft's refusal to place Java in Windows is intended to help leverage its monopoly to control the new market for Internet software that links computers.
Companies are vying to dominate the software market that powers computer networks that enable consumers to buy airline tickets, books, or other consumer goods online or to store information in cyberspace instead of on their home computers.
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