If this hadn't been released on April 2nd I'd be sure that this was some April Fools joke gone wrong… but I guess that's why they waited until the 2nd.  Anyway, in a highly unlikely development, Microsoft and SUN have announced a ten…that's right ten year technology collaboration "arrangement" that will:

...enable their products to work better together and to settle all pending litigation between the two companies.

The Technical Collaboration Agreement will provide both companies with access to aspects of each other's server-based technology and will enable them to use this information to develop new server software products that will work better together. The cooperation will initially center on Windows Server and Windows Client, but will eventually include other important areas, including email and database software. For example, one of the important elements of large scale computing environments is software to manage user identities, authentication and authorization. As a result of this agreement, Sun and Microsoft engineers will cooperate to allow identity information to be easily shared between Microsoft Active Directory and the Sun Java System Identity Server, resulting in less complex and more secure computing environments.

The companies have also entered into agreements on patents and other issues.

The agreements involve payments of $700 million to Sun by Microsoft to resolve pending antitrust issues and $900 million to resolve patent issues. In addition, Sun and Microsoft have agreed to pay royalties for use of each other's technology, with Microsoft making an up-front payment of $350 million and Sun making payments when this technology is incorporated into its server products.

So, basically SUN gets a two billion dollar cash infusion from Microsoft and Microsoft gets to stop worrying about integrating the JVM into current and future versions of Internet Explorer.

The companies have agreed that Microsoft may continue to provide product support for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine that customers have deployed in Microsoft's products.

More importantly though for the future, the agreement creates a setting whereby SUNs J2EE and Microsofts .Net, two competing development platforms, can exist in a market where their creators will work together to "improve technical collaboration" (read…development of a few key API's for interoperability).  Guess we'll just have to wait and see how that goes…man…I can be so skeptical sometimes ;)

Anyway….with Linux breathing down the necks of both SUN and Microsoft, and SUN releasing the x86 version of Solaris, one can only wonder whether Linus Torvalds provided the catalyst to make this all happen.  Just some food for thought.  What do you think?