The Microsoft Java Language Council

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From: Ben Slivka Sent: Thursday, January 16, 1997 3:01 PM To: Java VM All Teams (Win32 and Win 16) Cc: Brad Silverberg; Paul Maritz; Bob Muglia; Tod Nielsen; Brad Chase; Java Leads; Dean McCrory; Yuval Neeman; Brad Lovering; Anders Hejisbeerg; Paul Gross Subject: I think we have a winner in our Foundation Classes for Java

People at our Java Design Preview were pretty excited, lots of questions. Arthur Van Hoff, who wrote AWT while at Sun, now does Bongo at Marimba, said "First, thank you for fixing AWT".

Then he (and others) asked if we were giving it back to Sun. We said no. We're going to have to nail down the licensing issues here to make sure we on the IP, bit these classes are widely available to tools vendors and all developers.

The Sarrus Software guy (forgot his name) - they're writing Pencil-Me-In scheduling app on top of Netscape's IFC - said we should just put it out there. he thinks we will win the class libraries battle. "Netscape is a hell hole" for developers. He also mentioned that the IFC team (Jayson X?. etc) are not at all happy at Netscape.

Lots of people want the specs, sample, code, etc. now so they can start playing with it and give us feedback - we should probably pick a few key folks and give them early stuff under a special NDA. Both to get good feedback and start building buy-in from tools vendors and some key ISVs.

Great work by ianel, francish, and jeffbog (and davidms) to explain the problems with AWT, and how we solved them and are producing a great GUI class library. Jeff's code demo was especially instructive and compelling!

- bens

From: Brad Silverberg; Sent: Thursday, January 16, 1997 4:40 PM To: Ben Slivka; Charles Fitzgerald; John Ludwig; Erich Anderson (LCA) Cc: Paul Maritz; Bob Muglia; Tod Nielsen; Brad Chase; Paul Gross Subject: RE: I think we have a winner in our Foundation Classes for Java

our answer regarding if we are giving it back to sun should be, "we're not obligated to" rather than "no". who knows maybe there is some circumstance or business relationship where we would license to sun. in addition, "no" may be interpreted as we are supposed to but aren't. whereas, "we are not obligated to" is the accurate statement.

mansour from symantec liked what he saw. he did say though devs like nifc but thinks ours is better and they want to provide great tool support for it. i told him that there was more we didn't talk about and if they were truly serious about great tools support, we'd should have him back soon to tell more.

From: Ben Slivka Sent: Friday, January 17, 1997 10:15 AM To: Brad Silverberg, Charles Fitzgerald; John Ludwig; Erich Anderson (LCA); Peter Plamondon Cc: Paul Maritz; Bob Muglia; Tod Nielsen; Brad Chase; Paul Gross Subject: Symantec; Sun/AFC

Right, actually I did say that we didn't have to give AFC back to Sun, but we are open minded.

Peterpla, pdussud, ianel, and I took Mansour and his 5 developers (Walter Bright (sp?) compiler dude, Steve (OPTASM dude, now JIT) two dev managers - one for Cafe and one for Visual Cafe (I think), and their debugging guy). PeterPla & I are going to get an appropriate NDA in place with Symantec so they can work really closely with us - I offered to give them an office w/our team and be checked into our source code, and work closely with us in designing java native code, edit & continue, etc. (Other parts of symantec already have an agreement that permits them access to the Win95 and NT source code)

My goal is to have this NDA in place by Wed of next week, coincidentally Symantic are having a 3 day off-site M-W of next week to map out their tools strategy.

The symantic folks are cautious about embracing MS because they feel they got a raw deal on MFC, and that MS continued that practice by not giving them access to our early Java VM info. I was very clear that we want to make them successful, since it will make our platform successful.

We also talked about slowing down and coordinating modifications to the Java language - I proposed a "Java Language Council" made up of key tools vendors - MS, Borland, Symantec, PowerSoft (any others?) - who would cooperate to lean on JavaSoft. Symantec complained about Java "inner classes" (added in JDK 1.1) as being a really, really bad hack on the language. No one wants to turn Java into the mess that C++ is - complicated, slow to compile.

- bens

From: Erich Andersen (LCA) Sent: Friday, January 17, 1997 10:25 AM To: Ben Slivka, Brad Silverberg; Charles Fitzgerald; John Ludwig; Peter Plamodon Cc: Paul Maritz; Bob Muglia; Tod Nielsen; Brad Chase; Paul Gross Subject: RE: Symantec; Sun/AFC

ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD.

Privilege Material Redacted

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/px04258.pdf

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From: Erich Anderson (LCA) Sent: Sunday, February 16, 1997 2:10 PM To: Peter Plamondon; Sara Williams (DRG); Charles Fitzgerald; James Plamondon; Russ Arun Subject: RE: Symantec

Privilege Material Redacted

From: Peter Plamondon Sent: Sunday, February 16, 1997 1:39 PM To: Sara Williams (DRG); Charles Fitzgerald; Erich Anderson (LCA); James Plamondon; Riuss Arun Subject: RE: Symantec

I'm still highly conflicted on what to do with Symantic. They're so clearly allied with Sun/JavaSoft, and instantly disclose to Sun/JavaSoft when they learn of things like our Java compiler vendor meeting. I just can't convince myself we should give them special access to anything. They've failed to use public information to add support for our VM etc to their tools - why does it make sense to give them access to even more sensitive information?

They're similar to claris - claim they want to work witth us, but we have every reason to believe no good will come of it. Bit if we approach Symantic this way, we alienate them ( if there's any hope left of them supporting our stuff). If we're going to lose them anyway, lets not disclose anything that can be used against us. But that's backing down from what Ben said we'd do.

Mansour inquired where things stand, we need to bottom out on this ASAP. I'm on the road Tue-Fri, probably the same the following week.

Thanks! - Peter

From: Ben Slivka Sent: Sunday, February 16, 1997 1:39 PM To: Charles Fitzgerald Cc: Peter Plamondon; Erich Anderson (LCA) Subject: FW: Symantec

Please review and work with peter and erich to finalize.

This may be too broad/special-purpose - in light of Mansour's nature, maybe we should just stick to a standard NDA?

My goal is to make Symantec feel comfortable that they will get access to our VM technology at the same time as out internal tools group and other external tools vendors.

I had offered to have an office up at redmond for him to staff full-time with a Symantec employee (or maybe walter bright, their compiler guy who lives in Seattle, just comes to visit regularly?), give them access to our source code, and give them free access to key members of the development team.

At this point, though, I'm wondering if that is necessary or reasonable. I'm OK with them having an office near our team, but I think I would restrict access to the VM source code - as much to protect us as to protect their developer(s) from being "polluted" by loooking at Sun source code.

- bens

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/px04321.pdf