In Silicon Valley, it is often said that new tech companies are built on the bones of the old ones.
Sun Microsystems, one of the most influential tech companies of the 1990s, has been back in the news this week, and its old bones could end up costing Google more than $9 billion. In 1995, Sun released the first version of its Java programming language — or development platform, as many preferred to call it at the time.
Java was a programming breakthrough, just as browsing the World Wide Web was becoming mainstream. The Java motto at the time — “Write once, run anywhere” — while always a bit of an exaggeration, pointed to the importance that software created by anyone working on anything could have. Without that notion, the Web would not work.
Sun, founded years earlier and best known for its powerful workstation computers, became one of the most influential companies of the first dot-com boom. It moved on to making servers, which ran many of the most popular websites of the time. It is not a stretch to say that big thinkers at the company were mulling things like cloud computing — giant computer networks that connect over the Internet — years before they became a reality.
But Sun did not last as long as its ideas. Its costly servers, which usually ran on Sun-made computer chips and software, were undercut by cheaper servers that ran on common processors designed by Intel and Linux, a low-cost, open-source software alternative.
By the time the company tried to respond, it was too late. Oracle acquired Sun — and Java — for $7.4 billion in 2009. And as Oracle’s lawyers did an inventory of the intellectual property of their new purchase, they came to the conclusion that Google had violated Java copyrights in its Android operating system for smartphones.
In 2010, the first lawsuit was filed, and the case has been winding its way through the courts ever since. It returned to San Francisco this week, and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was the first to testify in the trial on Tuesday.
Interestingly, years ago, Mr. Schmidt was in charge of Java at Sun. He says that helped him know what was and was not a copyright violation. Oracle’s lawyers are sure to argue that history means he should have known better.
Sun is long gone, but its intellectual legacy lives on. So do its old headquarters. These days, they are part of Facebook’s campus.