December 9, 1999 Web posted at: 11:51 a.m. EST (1651 GMT) by John Cox

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NEW YORK (IDG) -- Sun wants Java to be an industry standard. But the company has decided there are two types of standards: its own and...someone else's.

At Java Business Expo this week, Patricia Sueltz, president of Sun's Software Products and Platforms group, said she has killed Sun's work with the European standards group, European Computer Manufacturers Association, to create an international standard for Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification.

ECMA officials earlier had hinted they might go forward on their own if the dispute could not be resolved. But Sun and archrival Microsoft are ECMA members.

Sun officials stressed their continued commitment to an open process of Java development, by including developers and other vendors in defining Java specifications. Sun refers to these efforts as "Church work" to distinguish them from its efforts to build and sell software based on the Java spec.

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Ironically, Sun proposed the project to ECMA last May, after scrubbing a similar proposal to a group affiliated with the International Organization for Standardization. In both cases, Sun wanted to win an official acceptance of Java, and was willing, in theory, to surrender control over at least some aspects of the technology it had created.

But ECMA had not agreed to maintain Sun's Java copyright, a major problem for Sun.

Sueltz's decision means that the Java language and its associated APIs and services remain firmly in Sun's control. Last night, Sueltz emphasized Sun's Java Community Process, announced last year as a way of including vendors and developers in defining new Java specifications and improving the existing ones.

She pointed to a reorganization of her group, announced just days before, as evidence of Sun's commitment to being the guardian of Java. With the changes, Sun named George Paolini as vice president of Java Community Development. His job is to oversee the improvement and adoption of Java through this community process. Paolini was previously the vice president of marketing.

"It remains to be seen what ECMA will do," Paolini said. "There are some indications they would go forward on their own." But in that case, ECMA would actually have only about 20% of the Java technology. "It would be hard to call that a standard," he said.

"I don't see any alternative to the Java Community Process [created by Sun]," he said.

Sueltz asserted her decision would not create a divided Java. And she said her decision was based on the devotion and commitment of her staff to the "Java community." Sueltz arrived at Sun two months ago from IBM.