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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 07:47 AM EDT |
Well the TCK for OpenJDK is different than some earlier TCK's and has no field
of use restrictions anymore so I don't think it would violate the GPL. I
haven't read it close enough to make a complete assesment of that though.
But what I think is that if you take OpenJDK and do what Sun/Oracle want you to
do with it which is keep it 99.9% the same and just port it to a new platform
then you are fine. The GPL2 license has a limited implied patent grant which is
not perfect but I think if you keep it 99.9% the same like this then it will
defiantly cover you. In this case you don't even need the TCK really as it
gives you nothing useful other than that warm fuzzy feeling you get from knowing
you are compatible. You don't get trademarks and can't call your version Java.
You get an explicit Patent grant from running the TCK but I don't think it helps
you much because all you have really done is do some work for Oracle porting
OpenJDK to a new machine.
Another thing you can use OpenJDK for is to fix a few bugs etc in it which
Oracle can suck back in.
If you decide to not follow Sun/Oracle's wishes and add/remove/change any of the
API's then you won't pass the TCK even if you wanted to. So you are left with
the GPL2 implied patent grant to protect you. But the problem is that some see
some holes in this implied patent grant and that it is a bit of a grey area.
For example it can be argued that based on European Union law that this limited
patent grant only applies to inventions in the original GPL'd code and if you
practice the same invention in code you add in a different situation then you
are not covered by the patent grant.
So where does that leave us? Well we have an open source free to use program
which you are not free to use unless you want to do nothing but port it as is to
a new platform of fix a few bugs. So you are free to help Oracle out! Go get
programming! Oh but if you want to do any innovation on top of it or improve it
for your own use and the betterment of others (the whole point of GPL'd code
really) then you just have to hope you don't piss Oracle off too much...
So its basically a completely one sided GPL'd bit of software! I think it is a
great big Joke that Sun/Oracle have been having at the FOSS community.
Michael[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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