One of Ours

Sun and Microsoft have reached a settlement in their long-running royalty and patent disputes, signing a 10-year agreement aimed at improving interoperability between the products of the two companies. Included in the agreement is a US$700 million payment to Sun to resolve pending antitrust issues and another US$900 million for patent issue resolution. Additionally, Microsoft will make an additional royalty payment of US$350 million, as the companies will be licensing one another's technologies under the agreement...

...This is big news for Sun, which just issued an earnings warning amidst plans to cut 3,300 jobs. The initial US$2 billion payout will go a long way towards making Sun profitable, and having Microsoft officially embracing Java while having some sort of .NET support for Sun may also help improve their outlook. Since Sun's Xeon and Opteron servers will now be Windows-certified under the agreement, it gives them an additional road into the enterprise as well. For Microsoft, the payment is a relatively small percentage of its US$53 billion bankroll, and frees up resources and development frozen or kept under wraps due to the ongoing litigation with Sun. Now if Microsoft could just get those pesky EU actions to go away