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Sun's Patent and Licensing Practices Examined

Posted by michael on from the cast-some-light-on-the-issue-ha-ha dept.

RMX writes "Groklaw has an excellent analysis of some Patent Questions About the CDDL. For /.ers who don't like reading a lot, the most important point is that 'it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.' The article also notes that 'The short answer why [some particular clause] is needed in the CDDL and not the GPL is that Linus Torvalds has not just entered into a cross-licensing arrangement with Microsoft, the relevant details of which are not public'. Makes you wonder what those relevant details are?" And reader rudy_wayne writes "David Berlind's column Will Sun's 1600 patents suck the life out of Linux? talks about Sun's open sourcing of Solaris 10 and the problems that occur due to the fact that so many open source licenses are incompatible with each other. One of his most important points is 'when a large company -- IBM, Sun, or anyone else-- donates code to the open source community with a one-off license, like the Eclipse Public License (IBM) or the CDDL (Sun) it gives those companies a way to donate their code to the open source community, which in turn can enhance it to the benefactor's advantage, without that code leaking into a competitor's product (with a non-reciprocating license) in such a way that it can be used against the benefactor.'"

7 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. The even shorter answer by lakeland · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is a bug in the draft licence which sun is actively working on. It won't be a problem in the final version. For some reason the summary forgot to mention that...

    1. Re:The even shorter answer by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Informative
      Dear AC,

      When someone threatens you, and tells the rest of the world that they are committing a philanthropic act, it is not FUD to set the story straight. Sun's "grant to the Open Source programmers" is written to threaten the Linux programmers, and indeed anyone who isn't working on Solaris. And yet they promote it as deserving greater recognition than IBM's grant, which was for all Open Source licenses that existed when IBM made the grant.

      Sun's conduct is deceptive, and setting the deception straight is hardly FUD.

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  2. Re:Translation please by lakeland · · Score: 3, Informative

    Summary: There is a bug in the draft of the licence. With any luck it will be fixed when the licence is released.

  3. The EPL doesn't stop IBM's donation from "leaking" by bmetz · · Score: 3, Informative

    The EPL doesn't stop IBM's donation of the original Eclipse source from "leaking" into competitor's products. In fact, the EPL has enabled many vendors to build products which directly compete against IBM's offerings. It is also important to note that in the case of Eclipse there is an independent non-profit organization which develops the code -- hence the E in EPL.

    --
    What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
  4. Re:Too much Law by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Informative
    It is the unfortunate truth that the occupation of engineers today is to marry together other peoples copyrights and patents to construct a derivative work, often one intended to be sold as a product. When I learned to use a soldering iron, I did not think of myself in those terms, but they were true then, and became even more true as ICs happened and then as programmable devices came about.

    We are approaching a point beyond which the art of engineering will be so seriously hindered that only very large companies will be able to approach the creation of software products. Legislative action will be necessary. But will the big companies win that legislative battle? They are winning it so far.Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  5. BZZZT! ERROR! by Steeltoe · · Score: 2, Informative

    Patents, already covered. Sun may at ANY time, due to loopholes in the license, close down everybody else distributing and working on "OpenSolaris". Besides, THEY own all YOUR changes (slave-license). In GPL ONLY YOU OWN YOUR OWN CHANGES (unless you donate it to the FSF).

    OpenSolaris has a license incompatible with the FSF (Free Software License). While TONS of other licenses are indeed compatible with FSF and the GPL: Check it out..

    Seeing your nick, you're a troll. This is not for you, but for those you might mislead.

    --
    http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
  6. Re:support free developmen by Homology · · Score: 3, Informative
    Maybe that's what's wrong with the BSD license. Sun took BSD code, added stuff to it and now makes it impossible for BSD to gain any benefit.

    There is nothing wrong with BSD license. It's quite simply a free license. Perhaps copycenter describes BSDL best :

    copycenter: n.

    [play on 'copyright' and 'copyleft']

    1. The copyright notice carried by the various flavors of freeware BSD. According to Kirk McKusick at BSDCon 1999: "The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called 'copycenter', which is 'take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want'".