Apple Tried to Bully Sun With Lawsuit Threats in 2003

From DailyTech: Faced with the growing threat of the Android army of smartphones to its best-selling iPhone, Apple unleashed a litany of litigation to try to stop sales of the phones. Google is too powerful to attack head on, so instead Apple is trying to pick off the hardware makers, starting with HTC, makers of the Hero, MyTouch, and Nexus One. There are a lot of questions over whether Apple's barking up the wrong tree, however, given how broad and vague its patents seem.

Jonathan I. Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, sounded off in a blog in which he recalls a similar incident in which Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs threatened to sue his company.

The event occurred back in 2003. Sun Microsystems had just unveiled "Project Looking Glass", a prototype Linux desktop with a rich 3D graphical desktop environment – Apple wasn't happy about that.

Jobs contact Schwartz, warning that the Linux project was "stepping all over Apple’s IP" and that if they put it out on the market, "I’ll just sue you."

However, Schwartz was wily and knew how to fight back. He had helped found Lighthouse Design, which made software for the short-lived NeXTSTEP operating system, which was acquired by Apple with the purchase of NeXT in 1996. A Lighthouse NeXT product, Concurrency (presentation software -- think PowerPoint), looked eerily similar to Apple's recently unveiled Keynote.

So Schwartz fired back at Jobs, "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP? And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too."

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