Do you remember the dog fight between Azul Systems and Sun Microsystems which took place in 2006? If not then let me tell you that Azul had slapped a lawsuit on Sun stating that the company was intimidating it over patents regarding multi thread software, garbage collection and multi core chips and Sun had replied back to the lawsuit by filing a patent infringement lawsuit on Azul. We thought that the battle would get murkier but to my utter dismay the matter was quietly resolved under the tables.

Mike Dillon, one of the top lawyers of Sun commented on this issue:

Now, after nearly fifteen months of litigation, the case has been resolved. The specific settlement terms are confidential (not uncommon in a case like this) but, they are favorable to Sun. I think it's likely that Azul had a change of heart about the case once they viewed some particularly damaging evidence that was provided in discovery.

But wait there is a lot more to this story than you might have thought - Stephen DeWitt, CEO of Azul was a former employee of Sun after the company had purchased Cobalt Networks which was headed by DeWitt but this acquisition was termed as the biggest mistake by Sun as it had to cancel the entire product line of Cobalt and everything else is history as we know. As a result Scott McNealy does not share great vibes with DeWitt after that episode. On the other hand Marc Tremblay has special attachment to the IP in question and I thought that some fireworks would take place for sure but everything was settled in a hush hush manner which left all of us disappointed.

Stephen DeWitt had something extremely sweet to say on this issue:

Sun is the clear and acknowledged inventor of Java and of associated multi-threaded systems. We have reached a settlement in the patent, trade secret and declaratory judgment cases, and all associated litigation between the companies has been resolved. In settling this case, we have reinforced our commitment to Java, and now look forward to working together with Sun to continue to bring innovative solutions to the Java community.

Whatever may be the case but there is still no news about the IP licensing and Azul continues to sell Java appliances like before. Does anybody have the answer to this?