| I did some digging around and did not find a statement by Sun or Oracle of the
form "You need a TCK license only if you want protection from our patents and
rights to use our trademarks".
What I did find is a bit more indirect. I did
find something that surprised me regarding trademarks, which I'll detail at the
end of this comment.
See Mark's article here on Groklaw What's the
Deal With the Java Specification License? . He analyzes what rights Oracle
says that they grant in the Java Specification license, and talks about which of
those rights don't actually require a grant.
My take from Mark's article is
that the the only right that one gets from the Java Specification License
(JSL)is the right to use Oracle's patents that apply, if any. The other rights
one would need to make an independent implementation are not ones that you need
to get from Oracle.
In order to get the rights under the JLS, you need to
have your implementation pass the appropriate TCK. To do that you have to get
the license to the TCK, which comes with a field of use restriction. But all
that gets you is the JSL, which in effect only gives you patent rights and an
agreement from Oracle that they won't go after you the way they have gone after
Google with claims about copyright infringement.
Finally, there is the issue
of trademarks. To use Oracle's Java trademarks and logos in regards to your
independent implementation, you need to get a separate Trademark License
Agreement from Oracle. That is referred to in the TCK license agreement. So
passing the TCK doesn't automatically get you any trademark rights after all. On
the other hand, it is clear from the way Oracle talks about it that the expected
process is that you get a TCK license, test your complete implementation with
the TCK, and when you have a compatible implementation that passes the tests you
get a Trademark License from Oracle.
The bottom line, as you can see from
Mark's article, is that all you get from the additional licenses is freedom to
practice the patents and to use the trademarks. You should be able to write a
compatible implementation with no license required (according to Google's
theory) or with just the GPLv2+CPE license that OpenJDK is distributed under
(according to Oracle's theory).
Some other insight can be found in this
letter that I found on the Apache Jakarta site. It looks like it was written by
Sun to people at Apache Jakarta, but I have not looked at all the other files in
the web site directory to fully understand what the document is: sideletter.pdf
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
| 
