It's an immutable law of high-tech big-business litigation: "What sues, then gets sued." And the legal shenanigans between Sun and Microsoft are no exception; a scant three weeks after Sun sued Billy & Co. for breach of contract, Microsoft has followed suit. And filed suit. To be exact, they filed a lawsuit alleging-- all together, now-- breach of contract. That's right, the mainstay of all high-tech legal activity! ZDnet has the story.

While Sun claimed that Microsoft violated its contract by shipping an incompatible version of Java (and leaking Java source code to developers), Microsoft is alleging that Sun has repeatedly failed "to live up to its obligations" and has not delivered Java technology that passes its own test suites. In addition, Microsoft says that Sun hasn't provided software that "runs on the Microsoft Reference Implementation," which is a phrase we find scary in the extreme. We don't know what that is, and we don't want to know.

At least now we know what we're going to be for Halloween. Ding-dong. "Trick or Treat!" "Why, aren't you cute! What are you supposed to be?" "I'm a Microsoft Reference Implementation!" Screams, fainting, consternation ensues.

Meanwhile, Digital has met the enemy-- and they are it.

That's right; just as Microsoft and Sun enter into lawsuits and countersuits, another long-standing legal battle has come to an end. Months after Digital sued Intel for violating patents in development of the Pentium (and Intel countersued Digital for patent violations in development of the Alpha), the end came not with a bang, but a buyout-- Intel is purchasing Digital's semiconductor operations as part of the settlement. Yahoo has the press release.

Pending government approval, the two chipmaker giants will team up to produce both Pentiums and Alphas-- and Intel's Next Big Chip, the Merced, which Intel is developing with Hewlett-Packard. Digital also agrees to produce a full line of Merced-based systems, for which it will port its own flavor of Digital Unix.

This likely doesn't bode well for the PowerPC alliance, who no longer have Digital's Alpha playing Perot to split the vote. We may have just seen the first ugly step towards a long, dark era of non-competition in the chip world. We weep for the death of the spirit and the soul. (Hey, who doesn't?)

Well, the long-awaited and widely-rumored announcement of Steve Jobs' permanent CEO-ship didn't come today, and the most vocal of the predicters, thessaSOURCE, is now reporting that the announcement may be delayed for a few days. The probable reason for the delay is the current state of the stock market, which plummeted farther than even on Black Monday ten years ago. (For a list of high-tech stocks and how they fared, Webintosh has excellent coverage-- for instance, Microsoft fell six and a half points, while Apple actually gained 3/16.)

What's more jarring to us than the stock market nosedive (since we don't invest, except for a 401K, and who actually believes that's real money anyway?) is thessaSOURCE's amended comment that they are in fact "no longer 100% certain Steve will indeed announce he is Apple's new CEO." As far as we know, they were the first to report that the Jobs CEO-ship was a lock; all of the other sources claiming the same thing seem to credit thessaSOURCE as the original source of the information. So other than the halting of Apple's CEO search, as independently reported on CNBC last Friday, the prospects of an official Jobs leadership remain slightly iffy.

And more of you seem to care about that fact than we would have thought. The results of our "Should Jobs be CEO?" survey are in-- tune in to the results for edification.