Sun Microsystems and Microsoft today announced they have reached several agreements that will result in payments to Sun of nearly $2 billion. Here are some of the main points:

• Legal settlements: Microsoft will pay $700 million, and Sun will withdraw its antitrust lawsuit in the United States.

• Patents: Microsoft will pay $900 million to Sun as part of a broad agreement not to sue each other over past patent infringement claims. They also are seeking a patent cross-license agreement.

• Technical collaboration: The companies will have access to each other's server technology, enabling their products to work together.

Very typical for Microsoft to pay such quantiy to Sun.

The third bullet "technical collaboration" is just an "advantage" of the deal in order to hide a little the thing that they only wanted to clean their problems with patents infrigement and antitrust cases.