Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

JBoss Offers Lawsuit Indemnification

Posted by simoniker on from the protected-shielded-sorted- dept.

prostoalex writes "JBoss Group offered its customers indemnification from potential legal problems related to patent violations and copyright lawsuits. According to Bob Bickel, JBoss VP, the move is intended to give customers more peace of mind when deciding whether to go with open-source software." The article also mentions Jboss' legal challenge to Apache Geronimo, of which Bickel said "...the letter to the Apache Software Foundation was never intended to be made public and said the conflict has been blown out of proportion."

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. not copied? by tarzan353 · · Score: 2, Redundant

    You're assuming by "copying" he means "cut and paste." Not at all. Copying could be somebody who read the JBoss code (which is open, and pretty good. I read quite a bit of it myself trying to decide whether it was a viable alternative to the ghastly expensive BEA WebSphere) writing identical functions for Geronimo. A bit like aspiring artists copying a famous painting, only much more illegal. Alternatively, it could be some well meaning developer thinking that "clean room" just means he has to retype it.

    I've seen a lot of aspiring programmers retype what's "in the book" and consider it their own work. It's entirely possible a contributor to Geronimo did the exact same thing.

  2. Confused... by XaXXon · · Score: 1, Redundant

    I'm really confused.

    JBoss has a J2EE implementation that they have licensed out under the LGPL. The Apache foundation has another, competing J2EE implementation, Geronimo, licensed under the Apache license (which is very similar to the BSD license?).

    JBoss is accusing Geronimo of taking their code and putting it into Geronimo. This would obviously be a violation because the Apache license isn't LGPL compatible.

    So it sounds like Geronimo should be indemnifying their users from legal action, not JBoss. Why would a JBoss customer need legal protection?

    Fortunately this isn't another SCO situation where JBoss won't tell what code they think is infringed upon. The rebuttals available seem pretty thorough and it looks like someone at JBoss was poking through the Geronimo code and noticed some similarities and ran to the lawyers. They promptly said "Yep, this is the same. We're sending a letter." Of course, no one thought that there were standards for the naming schemes and capitalization or that possibly code was contributed to both projects by the same people.

    Anyways, I'm still confused as to why JBoss customers need legal indemnification when JBoss is the aggressor in this situation.. ???