Sun meets HP CEO over Java dispute

But in a carefully worded articulation of the company's position, SunSoft President Alan Baratz said Sun will not loosen its control over the Java standard.

On Friday, HP disclosed plans to create a version of Java for the consumer market. Saying the company's developers had re-engineered the Java virtual machine without incorporating any Sun technology, officials maintained HP did not need a Java license.

Furthermore, HP announced an agreement to license its upcoming product to Microsoft Corp., Sun's bitter rival.

But Sun CEO Scott McNealy has since spoken with Lew Platt, his counterpart at HP. And Baratz indicated that from the tone of the conversation, there was room to narrow the divide between the two companies.

"According to Lew Platt, he has no intentions of infringing upon another company's intellectual property," Baratz said at the JavaOne conference here Tuesday. "I have a feeling that they were not properly informed."

Officials at HP were not immediately available for comment.

Whether all this signals real movement on the issue remains unclear because beyond the press posturing, this dispute turns upon a point of contention that leaves little room for maneuvering.

Sun last year received the approval of an international standards board to oversee the Java standard. The company, which jealously guards its prerogative, says the process approved by the global standards body -- the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO -- is not open to negotiation.

HP, Sun do agree on some things
Baratz disclosed that SunSoft and HP had negotiated for several months about licenses for Personal Java and Embedded Java, two products that were officially announced Tuesday at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

At one point, Baratz said, he held out the possibility of waiving the Java licensing fee altogether. "I asked, 'Does that solve the problem?' They said 'partially. But we don't like the process.' ... It really wasn't the money. It was the process.

"What we learned from years of experience with Unix and other technologies is that it tends to run more slowly," he said. "It's better to have one decision maker. ... There must be a decision maker to keep the process moving forward."

More conflict to come
However, Harry Fenik, an analyst at Zona Research Inc., said Sun's insistence upon controlling Java was a harbinger of more collisions with other companies in the computer industry.

"Despite any claimed Lew Platt quotations, no company the size of an HP or an IBM -- and anyone in between -- will allow their future to be dictated by Sun," Fenik said.

"Java is not an open standard -- it's anything but. It's Sun's proprietary environment and they might as well say it," he continued. "Sun has been alternatively greedy and grabby and has not allowed this thing to develop in the manner that their PR says it should."

IBM talking to HP
Meanwhile, IBM Corp. said Monday that it will take a look at HP's clone, assuming the licensing terms are favorable and that it conforms to Sun's Java standard.

"We would not turn it down," said Pat Sueltz, IBM's general manager, of Java software. "We are committed to open standards, and we will all compete on implementations of Java. Sun started out as a good steward of Java, but we all know what happened when Unix went awry. If we see that starting to happen again, we will speak up."

The issue threw a cloud over the first day of JavaOne, which Sun claims has attracted 14,000 developers. At one point during a press conference following his keynote, Baratz told reporters to stop asking questions about HP and focus on the many announcements Sun had made.

Deborah Gage of Sm@rt Reseller contributed to this story.