Sutor is referring to Sun's positioning itself as a company devoted to competing on the implementation of royalty-free standards. Examples that Sun routinely hauls out to prove this point are the systems it sells, which are largely based on two standards: the IEEE P1754 standard for Sparc and the Open Group's Unix standards like the Unix 98 standard and X Windows that's been set by the Open Group. More to Sutor's point, however, has been Sun's recent reluctance to support non-royalty-free technologies--especially ones that have IBM's backing. For example, it wasn't until after the first security specification for Web services--WS-Security--turned royalty-free that Sun was willing to get behind it. So, in the case of some technologies, Sun has been true to its word. But not when it comes to Java.

While Sun and other companies refer to Java as a standard, Java is no such thing. Sun will argue that the involvement of hundreds of vendors in the JCP means that Java's fate is controlled by the same democratic process that controls standards coming out of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or International Standards Organization (ISO).

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In my book, a technology that has not received the imprimatur of an independent standards setting consortia like the W3C or ISO--especially a technology that's not royalty-free--is no more a standard than other technologies where prevalence gets confused with the term "standard" and royalties are charged for deployment (i.e.: Intel's x86 instruction set or Microsoft's Windows).

While Sun is certainly entitled to protect its intellectual property in the same way that Intel, Microsoft, and IBM do, Sutor wants Sun to look at Java the same way that Sun wants IBM and other vendors to look at Web services specifications like WS-Security.

"What Sun needs to accept about using the line of arguments they do is that it applies to them as well," says Sutor. "Sun is a competitor to us and is not a neutral body. What we want is an industry neutral body where no one company has too much power and that body has to have jurisdiction over all of the Java specifications."

Why was Sutor so adamant about the all-encompassing nature of this neutral body? What he said next made it clear: "If Java was an open standard, technologies like [Microsoft's] C# and the technologies it works with [like .Net] might not exist today."

With a substantial part of its software portfolio vested in Java, IBM would prefer not to leave anything to chance. Just as the Web grew on the backs of royalty-free protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, Sutor is arguing that liberation would stimulate Java's entrenchment and further growth, thereby greatly limiting .Net's chances of success. While dispatching Sun would be a tactical success, the endgame (as I've pointed out before) for IBM is not to beat Sun. It's to beat Microsoft.

While there's no telling what ubiquity Java might have achieved as an open standard, Sutor is probably right. Microsoft would likely have a more difficult time launching .Net against Java as an entrenched open standard than it would against Java as a proprietary technology. In fact, Sutor wonders whether .Net might have been launched at all: "What are C# and the Common Language Runtime virtual machine (CLR)? They're pretty much the same thing as Java. They're a language and a virtual machine with a few other differences. Maybe if Java was an open standard, Microsoft would have supported it instead of coming out with .Net."

In a post-.Net, non-standard Java world, that's a moot point. Now IBM wants the opening of Java--all of Java--fast-tracked. Opening up all of the JSRs would give Java at least one advantage over .Net. Currently, C# and the CLR are the only parts of .Net on target to become open standards. As .Net-based virtual machines go, the CLR is a heavily stripped down version of the full-blown .Net virtual machine. The CLR (and perhaps .Net) might not stand a chance against the fully open Java standard.

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