Microsoft has asked a federal appeals court to delay a court order
forcing it to distribute Sun Microsystems' Java software with
Windows.
An emergency motion filed by Microsoft lawyers on Wednesday claimed
that Sun does not face any "imminent irreparable harm" that could
require Microsoft to include Java in its Windows operating system.
In December, judge Frederick Motz ordered Microsoft to ship Sun's
Java with Windows, and on Tuesday, Motz gave Microsoft 120 days
from 4 February to begin doing so. The 4 February date was given to
allow Microsoft time to appeal.
In the emergency motion, Microsoft called the court's order
"extreme and unprecedented" and asked for it to be shelved pending
appeal.
Microsoft's lawyers said Sun's Java is the leader in the market for
Internet-enabled distributed platforms and argued that future
competition is no grounds for the order to include Sun's Java in
Windows now. They insisted Immediate irreparable loss or damage
must be proven.
Without an additional stay from the appeals court, Microsoft will
have to start work on including Java in Windows on 4 February.
Microsoft's lawyers argued this would require "an enormous amount"
of Microsoft's engineering resources and would affect the quality
of the software and service the company offers.
Sun had asked the court to order Microsoft to distribute the Sun
Java Virtual Machine as part of its multimillion-dollar private
antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. It claimed Microsoft had used
its monopoly to flood the market with versions of Java that are not
compatible with Sun's Java.
Sun lawyers have said the order is necessary because Sun's Java is
losing ground to Microsoft's .net development framework.