|
|
|
| Authored by: webster on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:34 PM EDT |
.
How do you define a fork?
.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 04:03 PM EDT |
Neither is Apache Harmony. It's similarly a ground-up
rewrite. It existed for years prior to Android. Neither
Oracle nor Sun has ever taken legal action against Harmony.
Indeed, Sun negotiated with them specifically around rights,
and walked away with only "You need the TCK to actually call
it Java, and we won't give it to you without Field of Use
restrictions" as a takeaway. If they're allowed to do it
sans license, Google has a reasonable expectation they
should be allowed as well (the Estoppel argument in a
nutshell)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: jbb on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 04:23 PM EDT |
And yet, now, Oracle, the new owner, steps up and says, if you
fork, you have damaged us and have to pay. That's a sharp turn indeed. And yet
forks, according to Tim Bray, would be "terrific".
Forks fragment.
Fact of life. One of Oracle's main damages arguments is that by making a
non-standard implementation, Google has caused fragmentation and thus harmed
Oracle. It does not matter if Dalvik is technically a fork or not. Since
Oracle claimed it welcomed forks, this proves that they were not concerned about
fragmentation. They said it would be a good thing.
This fits with the
statements by Schwartz when he said that everyone was free to use Harmony as
long as they didn't call it Java. It also fits with the Schwartz exclaiming
that Android would be a huge benefit to Java. Sun's plan was to have a vibrant
and diverse eco-system of Java-like implementations but only those which met
Sun's TCK specifications could be called "Java". Remember, Sun's successful
suit against Microsoft was over their use of the "Java" trademark. Trademarks
are not an issue in this case.
If Google can show that Sun/Oracle was
encouraging fragmentation then this would be a serious blow to what is left of
Oracle's case.
It's fine for Oracle to now change their mind over the
wisdom of Sun's open Java strategy. It is quite another thing for Oracle to try
to pretend Sun never had that strategy. If Sun's strategy was to encourage
diverse implementations of Java implementations that could not pass then TCK
then Oracle has no valid complaint. IANAL but ISTM it should be hard to
successfully sue someone for doing exactly what you encouraged them to
do.
---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, April 24 2012 @ 02:58 AM EDT |
That comes, of course, with an explicit licence to use the Sun JDK and all the
patents that come with it. Google and Harmany require developers to download and
use the fully licensed JDK and related documentation.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
