http://web.archive.org/web/20111206010152/nytimes.com/1998/10/22/business/memos-released-in-sun-microsoft-suit.html

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.