McNealy on .Net: "You know the first hit of heroin is free"

Scott McNealy, the outspoken CEO of Sun Microsystems, has hit out at Microsoft's attempts to lure developers to the .Net platform.

Microsoft recently launched an initiative to help developers build products based on .Net (or "dot-not", as McNealy prefers to call it).

But Sun's boss claims that moving to the platform would simply tie them into a proprietary architecture.

He is quoted as saying: "You know that the first hit of heroin is free."

Java is a truly open standard, he added during a speech made at the JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco.

Microsoft launched the .Net developer toolkit on 13 February. At the time, Gavin King, developer tools product manager at Microsoft, said: "This will enable greater developer productivity than ever before, with programs easier to write and easier to deploy.

"The web services standards - XML, WSDL, SOAP and UDDI - have been built into the tool itself, making the development of web services applications native to the toolkit."

In a wide-ranging speech, McNealy went on to say that the computer industry is far from maturity. "I would say we are still very early days in the computer world. There is a massive amount of stuff that it not being captured by the net," he claimed.

He claimed that his rivals - including Compaq, HP and Dell - are relying too much on the technology of other companies and are failing to innovate.

"You've got to spend in R&D. Dell doesn't do R&D."