Sun hopes to enlist one of Microsoft's worst foes, the open-source community, in the Jxta effort. Jxta will be open-source software, meaning that anyone can modify and redistribute the software without restriction. The open-source community has challenged not just Microsoft but also Sun with successes such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server. What's in it for Sun is a peer-to-peer infrastructure on which higher-level commercial applications can operate, Joy said. "We have some distributed applications we'd like to run," he said. Jxta will include standards for how devices in a peer-to-peer network identify themselves and are grouped together, Joy said. It also will include a security mechanism to ensure that distributed programs don't harm the device they're running on, Joy said, in contrast to the e-mail viruses that afflict networked Windows systems.

Mike Clary, head of the Jxta project, said the software will include ways that computing tasks can be linked together in "pipelines"that span a peer-to-peer network. In addition, Jxta will offer a mechanism by which tasks can be monitored and controlled. Taking on Microsoft Jxta fits into Sun's vision of the future of the Internet, called Sun One. "This will probably be part of the Sun One platform, but will probably be one of the simplest pieces," Mr Joy said. "We're not turning this into something that's infinitely complicated like (Microsoft's) .Net." The new project walks a fine line between attempting to control the burgeoning new peer-to-peer technology world and leaving it open to the whims of smaller developers.

Joy disclaimed any desire to control the new market. Jxta is meant simply as a lingua franca that will let separate peer-to-peer applications work in concert with one other, he said. "We don't want to have a standards body," Mr Joy said. "We are not here trying to get everyone to license this like we're doing with Java. We don't necessarily even want to be the center of this." Nevertheless, the first release of Jxta-dueout in April on the CollabNet site, Joy said-will be code-written under the direction of Sun and Joy's team. And it's not easy to foresee any other company or set of developers taking the same kind of role, even in an ostensibly open-source project, that a company with the market power of Sun has. Jxta already has some competition as a unified effort. Intel has sponsored a peer-to-peer working group that is already aiming at creating standards for peer-to-peer applications. Although the effort initially proved controversial, the group has already begun work.

Learning from past mistakes Sun no doubt hopes Jxta will be more successful than its predecessors-two other Sun brainchildren, Java and Jini-in luring the help of the open-source movement. Well after Java and Jini were created, Sun tried to attract the attention of the open-source community by retrofitting the tools with half-shared, half-proprietary software licenses.

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