The steadily deteriorating relations between Azul System and Sun Microsystems have now resulted in litigation. Azul Systems has filed for declaratory relief on Wednesday in an attempt to protect its self from Sun.

Sun is claiming that Azul is infringing on 20 of their patents and is using their intellectual property. Azul alleges that Sun has demanded that the grant Sun part ownership of the company and agree to pay up-front fees and royalties under constant threat of litigation. According ot Azul, negotiations broke down when Sun told them to pay up for face litigation. A number of the alleged violations involve multi-core chip technology that both Sun and Azul are developing.

Azul is a startup that is developing hardware design specifically to run the Java Platform. Their multi-core chip technology contains a number of hardware assists to help Java take better advantage of multi-core CPUs. Sun Microsystems has similar effort in Niagara, a multi-core CPU technology that blurs the lines between chip, CPU, and thread.

Sun is saying that they have spent more then a year trying to resolve this situation with Azul and this last action is just more stonewalling by the upstart hardware company. This action is most likely going to result in Sun launching its own legal actions.

Most notable is that Azul employs several ex-Sun employees including Chief Executive Steve DeWitt. However this is hardly a new situation as techies often move from one company to another and it is no secret that Sun has shed a number of engineers in the recent past so the significance of this point is unclear.

Clearly both Sun and Azul have the right to protect their respective property. However whatever the outcome of this latest action, industry analysts don’t believe that Azul or Sun will be better off.

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I saw the Azul system at JavaOne last year and also heard their presentation. That stuff is awesome!

I'd love to try one of those, but have yet to find an employer who uses it

Azul is a startup that is developing hardware design specifically to run the Java Platform.

Sun has a reputation w/ it's partners. There's Harmony "JVM" (the Apache + IBM clean room impl.) coming.
My guess is that Niagra will prove to be a waste of R&D $ in coming years.
Maybe they should focus on selling Opteron online w/o sales force (w/ Linux like Dell) and instead improve Swing/Desktop (like WinFX) so there are clients/users for it's "server services".

When is "HarmonyOne" conference (Java - Sun)?

.V

ps: I wonder if somone should sue Sun under comerce laws if any failed EJB project delays a business improvment becuase of EJB.


pps: Sun as per this and elsewhere also allegedly w/ M$ funded a suit against Linux vendors (w/ SCO in front):
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=95734455-A914-4BC1-A6E3-299C32E289AB
About that time some started using jRockit JVM to run on Linux instead. A friend to Open Source?

Diclaimer: Any posts are for pure entertinment and do not represent anything real, resemblence to facts is acidental and sily by any reasonable person.

The steadily deteriorating relations between Azul System and Sun Microsystems ..

This is a shame. I don't know any of the details of the dispute, but this is not the first time that we have witnessed Sun hurting itself by attacking one of its own supporters.

Sun with its Niagra servers (e.g. 8x CPU cores and 32x concurrent threads inside a 1u box) and Azul with its Java appliance (e.g. 384x CPU cores in a 13u box, IIRC) are both doing some great, innovative things, and between the two of them we might even be able to curb global warming (since around 60% of the power supply in the USA supposedly goes to computers).

Let's hope that these two companies can work this out, before it becomes another black eye on our industry. These are two of my favorite tech companies, and no good can come of this.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java