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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 wai
by 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 agoThe 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.