Microsoft attorneys return to court April 3 bent on convincing the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that an earlier federal court order forcing the Redmond, Washington software giant to carry Java programming in Windows doesn't serve the public interest.
"We're going to make the point that this hasn't been done before," said company spokesman Jim Desler to ZDNet.com April 2. Desler called the order "unprecedented (and) unnecessary."
The original order, handed down in December, ordered Microsoft to put Java, created by bitter rival Sun Microsystems, into Windows on grounds that, as federal judge J. Frederick Motz put it, Microsoft had a history of "undermining" Sun's rival programming language. The Motz order was part of the overall move to "remedy Microsoft's past antitrust violations and level the playing field between Java and Microsoft's .NET Web service software," ZDNet said.
Sun sued Microsoft on grounds that Microsoft tried sabotaging Java, which runs on numerous operating systems as well as Windows. "I find it an absolute certainty," Motz ruled in a 42-page decision, "that unless a preliminary injunction is entered, Sun will have lost forever its right to compete, and the opportunity to prevail, in a market undistorted by its competitor's antitrust violations."
Microsoft told the appeals court in a March filing that there was no danger, now or in the immediate future, that Sun was in any danger of harm now or in the near future. Sun seeks at least $1 billion in damages from its lawsuit, and Microsoft has held that monetary damages should be enough to rectify any past wrongdoing.
