http://web.archive.org/web/20111226085950/http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/business/memos-released-in-sun-microsoft-suit.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

Documents released today in the Microsoft Corporation's second major legal front -- the lawsuit filed by its rival Sun Microsystems -- include E-mail messages and internal memos certain to embarrass both parties.

The internal documents are being made public in a contract suit Sun filed last year against Microsoft. Sun is accusing Microsoft of altering and co-opting its Java programming language -- and thus undermining a potential threat to the dominance of the Windows operating system -- in violation of a technology licensing pact between the two companies.

Microsoft counters that Sun has unilaterally ''rewritten'' the contract to preclude Microsoft from enhancing Java to work more efficiently with its own Windows platform.

The court documents state that in April 1997, Ben Slivka, the Microsoft manager responsible for executing the Java strategy, sent an E-mail to Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates, noting ''When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues and concerns.''

Mr. Slivka goes on to ask if Mr. Gates's concerns included ''How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?'' and ''How we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?''

According to one of Sun's motions, unsealed by a Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., today, Microsoft wrote in a pricing proposal that it should ''kill cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market.''

But Sun also took hits in the release of the documents, including an internal electronic message from one Sun manager that notes flatly, ''Microsoft was smarter than us when we did the contract.''

Indeed, just as E-mail evidence has taken center stage in Microsoft's battle against the Justice Department in Washington, so, too, electronic missives and internal documents are playing a key evidentiary role in the legal battle over the control of the Java programming language.

The strength of Java, which was introduced by Sun in 1995, is that it is a ''cross platform'' language: developers can use it to write a single program to run on different kinds of computers, regardless of which operating system they are running.

In a hearing last month, Sun asked the court for a preliminary injunction to stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 98 until it had modified the newest version of its operating system to comply with Sun's version of Java. Judge Ronald M. Whyte has not yet ruled on that motion, but today he unsealed two Sun motions that accuse Microsoft of copyright infringement and unfair competition and Microsoft's rebuttals to those motions.

In its rebuttal, Microsoft cites an E-mail from David Spenhoff, Sun's director of marketing, that states, ''Microsoft was smarter than us when we did the contract.

''What I find most annoying is that no one at Sun saw this coming,'' the note continues. ''I don't think our folks who negotiated and agreed to these terms understood at the time what they meant.''

Lisa Poulson, a spokeswoman for Sun, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., countered that Mr. Spenhoff is not a lawyer and that he had not participated in the negotiations.

In another instance, Microsoft points to notes from an internal meeting at Sun, in which its former chief technology officer, Eric Schmidt, now chief executive of Novell Inc., ''plots to evolve Java'' into an operating system to compete with Windows.

A Microsoft spokesman, Jim Cullinan, said that the meeting indicated that Sun intended to make Java a proprietary system, just as it was accusing Microsoft of doing.

The bottom line, said Mr. Cullinan, is that ''Sun continued to try to rewrite this contract because they are trying to prevent us from delivering the best and fastest Java implementation in the marketplace.''

For its part, Sun states in its court documents that Microsoft's strategy was no less than to turn Java into an adjunct of Windows -- and that Microsoft's own internal communications demonstrate that intention.