Java Politics

Quite simply, programmers who write in Java are turning away from operating system-specific programming. This means that control and distribution of the "virtual machine", the mechanism that insures platform independence, is central to Microsoft's war of containment. Were it not for Microsoft's back-room coercion, Intel would have built a "virtual machine" component into their recent CPU chips that would have supported the Java language in hardware (reported in the Aug. 27, 1998 Guardian). Such a component would have furthered enormously the movement to decouple software development from operating system content. operating systems run on Intel chips). In the absence of a chip-based component, Java faces mutative meddling by Microsoft and its business allies, whose non-standard virtual machines encourage programmers to write "Java"-esque code that won't run under other operating systems. The courts will have something to say about these practices, because Sun Microsystems, the developer of the Java language, licensed the Java technology to Microsoft with the understanding that Microsoft's implementation would have to meet standards. But if Apple's early 80's "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft showed anything, it is the perilousness of relying on the courts. Back