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U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz handed Sun a win, Microsoft a setback, and all of us something new (or old) to talk about when he recently granted Sun the preliminary injunction it had sought in its private antitrust lawsuit against everyone's favorite Redmond-based computer monopolist.

The specific terms of the order have not yet been determined, but the gist is that Microsoft will be required to ship a Sun-compatible Java Virtual Machine with each copy of Windows.

Presumably, this will mean Microsoft shipping Sun's own Windows JVM with Windows, rather than Microsoft's own seriously outdated JVM, which, according Sun, has held back the spread of Java with its agedness. Of course, Microsoft's JVM has become outdated largely because Bill and Co. agreed to stop developing it as part of a settlement of a previous suit between the two companies.

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News source: eWeek

Here's what it boils down to: Microsoft, through its desktop operating system monopoly, has a lock on what Sun perceives to be the sweetest software distribution system around—Windows is on everyone's desktop, and inside nearly every new desktop system that's sold today.

Microsoft's .Net has come onto the scene (on paper, at least), promising to do roughly what Java does, and Sun's concerned that this'll mean curtains for Java, unless it can convince the courts to make Microsoft ship Sun's JVM product, along with Microsoft's operating system product.

With this injunction, Sun's won round one, and I think it's a negative development.

First, we don't want the courts deciding what goes into software products. We lambaste the courts as tech-uninformed and brand their decisions as short-sighted—then, when a judgment happens to jibe with what we want, we cheer. He who lives by the lawsuit dies by the lawsuit.

If Microsoft had made it impossible to install Sun's JVM on Windows computers, and the courts ordered Microsoft to stop that behavior, that would be another story.

Alternatively, if Microsoft were preventing computer OEMs from bundling Sun's JVM with its systems, as Microsoft did in preventing BeOS from sitting beside Windows on dual-boot systems, that'd be another appropriate situation for the court to address.

Sun's JVM amounts to a plug-in, much like Macromedia's Flash or Adobe's Acrobat Reader or, to choose a more directly applicable example, Real's Real Player. These are all pieces of software that I download each time I set up a new system, and there's no reason why it should be any different for Sun and its JVM.

"But the JVM is such a large download, and Sun can't depend on Internet users to download the JVM, and users will turn instead to .Net, and all will be lost," you may retort.

The Internet is a much better distribution mechanism than is a boxed copy of Windows and new OEM shipments, and the Internet grants Sun and all the other plug-in makers I've mentioned a much greater level of control over the product they're distributing. And frankly, if Internet users can't handle a plug-in download, then I don't know what Sun expects they'll be doing with Java.

And as for .Net dominion, I use Java every day, and I've been doing so for years now. I've never used .Net. That's today—tomorrow, people will choose what works for them. It's probably true that all else being equal, .Net could push Java off the scene at some point down the road, but Java's got a massive head start on .Net now. It'd take some major slipping by Sun to squander that lead, no matter how its JVM gets distributed.

We close with a message for users and vendors alike: As long as Microsoft maintains its desktop OS monopoly, it'll have a cherry place to hawk its wares and a strong grip on how we all compute. You can either get used to it and fall in line, or start choosing open platforms for yourself and your enterprise.