[www.eweek.com]

December 5, 2002 Sun Grills Microsoft on Interoperability By Darryl K. Taft

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In an exchange during the testimony of James Allchin, a Microsoft senior executive, in the landmark government antitrust case against Microsoft, this issue first arose. In that proceeding ‘foo’ was described as the codename at Microsoft for the WS-I, which documents showed Microsoft sought to exclude Sun from becoming a founding member.

In this hearing, U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz asked, “What is ‘foo’?”

Layman explained that ‘foo’ was a name made up by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for Microsoft’s effort to develop a marketing proposal to combat the appeal that Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) had garnered among corporate developers. “We needed to come up with an alternative that would resonate with developers,” he said.

I shall have to share this with NTK…