MS/DOJ: IBM Faces Cross-Examination

IBM Corp. executive John Soyring is expected to take the stand again today to answer further questions in the government's antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.

Soyring, director of network services computer services at IBM, has testified that Microsoft agreements have made it difficult for application developers to port or adapt applications developed for Windows to OS/2. Soyring took the witness stand late yesterday afternoon, and faced cross-examination by Microsoft attorney Steven Holley.

Soyring is also expected to be grilled on testimony about how Microsoft used its own implementation of Java to limit competition.

Meanwhile, yesterday, Sun Microsystems Inc. was granted a preliminary injunction by a U.S. district court in its Java lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. Judge Ronald Whyte of the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Northern District of California, ruled that Sun is likely to prevail on the merits of the case, and ordered Microsoft to make changes to its products so that they include an implementation of Java that will pass Sun's Java compatibility test suite.

(Based on reports by Patrick Thibodeau, a senior writer for Computerworld and James Niccolai, of the IDG News Service's San Francisco bureau).