3 ms·

It's ambiguous. Oracle's not the only company with patents in Java technology, the TCK patent protection clause is stronger than that in the GPL, in that it giv

by ig1 16y ago

It's ambiguous. Oracle's not the only company with patents in Java technology, the TCK patent protection clause is stronger than that in the GPL, in that it give you protection against non-Oracle patents that are part of Java. It's arguable that Oracle implicitly licences these as part of the GPL patent clause, but it's not watertight. Third-party implementations such as Harmony (and presumably GNU Classpath) obviously don't have patent protection because they neither derive from OpenJDK nor have a TCK licence. Java isn't open until anyone can freely implement it.

rbanffy 16y ago
> It's arguable that Oracle implicitly licences these as part of the GPL patent clause, but it's not watertight. It's Oracle's obligation to either give a royalty-free permission to use and grant usage of its patented technology (all of it, not only stuff expressed in code it contributed) or refrain from distributing OpenJDK under GPL altogether. http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents Unless I misread the text there.
- ig1 16y ago
  Oracle isn't the only company with patents in the JRE though, when a third party contributes patented technology to the JRE they have to agree to the patent waiver for all TCK passing implementations. Dependent on the language of these waivers, Oracle may or may not be considered to be "controlling" the patents. If they're not controlling the patents then it means they can't give the GPL waiver on behalf of the other contributors, and thus any non-TCK compliant OpenJDK fork may be in violation. Speaking more generally GPL v2 was never really designed to handle patents, the patent clauses are pretty much secondary to the rest of the GPL, and probably are much more vulnerable to attack via loopholes than the rest of the GPL due to their vague and implicit nature.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    The GPL states that if you fail to grant downstream users rights to use and redistribute the code (which includes any patented code contributed by the patent holder to the product from any party that did it, not only Oracle) you cannot distribute your code under the GPL. If Oracle included patented technology it did not control, then it must stop distribution of infringing code under the GPL. That's one of the reasons it took so long for Sun to license its code under GPL - it was cleaning up code, removing patent-infringing code. The terms of the TCK will not protect you from lawsuits for infringing on patents Oracle had not the right to grant you usage. In fact, no agreement with Oracle would.
parenthesis 16y ago
> Java isn't open until anyone can freely implement it. This is the nub of the matter.

by ig1 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago

> It's arguable that Oracle implicitly licences these as part of the GPL patent clause, but it's not watertight. It's Oracle's obligation to either give a royalty-free permission to use and grant usage of its patented technology (all of it, not only stuff expressed in code it contributed) or refrain from distributing OpenJDK under GPL altogether. http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents Unless I misread the text there.

ig1 16y ago
Oracle isn't the only company with patents in the JRE though, when a third party contributes patented technology to the JRE they have to agree to the patent waiver for all TCK passing implementations. Dependent on the language of these waivers, Oracle may or may not be considered to be "controlling" the patents. If they're not controlling the patents then it means they can't give the GPL waiver on behalf of the other contributors, and thus any non-TCK compliant OpenJDK fork may be in violation. Speaking more generally GPL v2 was never really designed to handle patents, the patent clauses are pretty much secondary to the rest of the GPL, and probably are much more vulnerable to attack via loopholes than the rest of the GPL due to their vague and implicit nature.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  The GPL states that if you fail to grant downstream users rights to use and redistribute the code (which includes any patented code contributed by the patent holder to the product from any party that did it, not only Oracle) you cannot distribute your code under the GPL. If Oracle included patented technology it did not control, then it must stop distribution of infringing code under the GPL. That's one of the reasons it took so long for Sun to license its code under GPL - it was cleaning up code, removing patent-infringing code. The terms of the TCK will not protect you from lawsuits for infringing on patents Oracle had not the right to grant you usage. In fact, no agreement with Oracle would.

parenthesis 16y ago

> Java isn't open until anyone can freely implement it. This is the nub of the matter.