THE FUTURE OF "PURE JAVA".

Who controls the Java programming language? For the moment, the answer seems to be Sun Microsystems, which last week won a surprise injunction against Microsoft's efforts to "pollute" Java with Windows-specific extensions. Microsoft now has 90 days to rework its operating system and browser code so they pass Sun's "100% Pure Java" certification test--or else pull any non-compliant products off retail shelves.

Device independence is a fundamental design principle for Java, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald M. Whyte noted, which inherently limits Microsoft's right to create a proprietary version for Windows. "Adopting non-standard keywords and modifying a compiler to accept them violate Java's main objective that a Java program should compute the same result on all machines and all implementations,'" said Whyte.

Whyte's ruling left Microsoft's top language executives scrambling for a common strategy message. Paul Maritz, who heads Microsoft's applications and tools group, at first told reporters his company might simply walk away from any future support for Java. A day later, senior vice president Bob Muglia fired off a letter to developers insisting that Microsoft's "commitment to Java has not wavered." Then two days later, another spokesperson announced that Microsoft had just decided to dump its Macintosh and Unix Java projects. Not surprisingly, Java developers were beginning to wonder where Microsoft was going to take them today.

In fact, Judge Whyte has left the company almost no wiggle room over the next few months. Microsoft has to replace its proprietary Java "virtual machine" interpreters with a plain-vanilla VM that quite possibly won't run existing applications created by Microsoft's widely- used Visual J++ 6.0 development toolkit (which the judge also ordered Microsoft to revise). No amount of damage-control from Redmond changes the fact that Microsoft made promises to developers that it now can't keep.

But if there are champagne corks popping in Sun's JavaSoft division, it's probably premature. Sun won a clearcut licensing decision, but there's still a gaping hole in its overall legal position that the injunction doesn't touch--the likelihood that the Java language itself isn't protectable as intellectual property.

In fact, major language developers--including Microsoft--recognize the principle that no one legally "owns" the abstract syntax of a programming language. At most, it's possible to copyright the specific code for a compiler or object library, and perhaps to trademark a name like "Java." But every attempt to claim legal ownership of a whole language has failed in the courts. (Trivia buffs might recall that Microsoft's first product was a knockoff--an unlicensed knockoff--of Basic that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote for the Altair back in 1975.)

Paul Maritz has already hinted publicly that Microsoft might decide to write a "clean room" version of Java that wouldn't require a Sun license. In practice, that's a substantial project, since the developers of the new language--let's call it "Visual J++"--would have to reverse engineer Java from a functional specification, without recycling any existing Microsoft source code. But a "J++" clone really only needs one-way compatibility: It would have to execute standard Java code properly on a Windows machine, but it wouldn't have to satisfy the more ambitious "write once, run everywhere" standard that Sun requires for "100% pure" Java.

The net effect, of course, would be to fracture the already-precarious unity of the Java development community. Developers who write exclusively for Windows will mostly adopt Microsoft's J++ version, while Sun loyalists may end up with a language that runs "everywhere" but has no single platform that really matters. Worse, from Sun's perspective, a fractured standard is bound to encourage more in- fighting among its licensees. Hewlett Packard is already lobbying for the right to create a version of Java specifically for the embedded processor market; a group called The Java Lobby is beginning to complain noisily that Sun hasn't evolved Java fast enough for their requirements.

Sun's answer to this pressure has been to propose an "open source" model for the next round of Java development: Licensees would be invited to contribute enhancements to the core language, while Sun would play a more modest role as the integrator and keeper of Pure Java compatibility standards. Even Microsoft would be welcome to take part, says JavaSoft president Alan Baratz. "This is an opportunity for Microsoft to rejoin the Java community."

But this pleasantly democratic vision suffers from a fatal flaw: Microsoft almost certainly won't play in any game where Sun writes the certification rules. And without Microsoft's cooperation it's hard to imagine that any language standard--even Java--will be seen as truly universal.

And in the end, a fractured Java marketplace is exactly what Microsoft wants. Over the next decade, one of the biggest threats to Microsoft is the proliferation of "pervasive computing" devices--smart phones and pagers, TVs, videogame machines, palm and mobile computers, and hundreds of other networked appliances. Collectively, these devices represent a major threat to Microsoft's "fat client" PC business--but only if most of these devices end up running one common programming language. Increasingly, it seems clear that the standard for pervasive computing won't be a single "100% pure" version of Java.