The problem is clarity

Posted May 21, 2005 18:19 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Early in the process, Sun was asked what their reaction would be to code in other projects that seemed to embody those patents. The answer was along the lines of "we reserve to right to utilize our intellectual property". It is very hard to take that as anything but a threat UNLESS it is Sun's open source that is being contributed to. They could have allayed that worry very easily; they chose to play it up.

Hmm, I don't remember that. Further, that's a nasty and loaded question to be asked. Anyone with corporate responsibility who's asked "Will you indemnify a huge and vaguely defined swathe of software developers against infringement of your patents?" really has no alternative but to answer in the negative, "We reserve the right" is as good an answer as could be given, and is not at all a threat. Any other answer would have been irresponsible for a corporate officer to give. Hence the accusation of "playing up the patent threat" seems quite unjustified.

You simply can not give an off-the-cuff answer here of "sure why not", as such a remark would literally have significant legal standing. It's a matter of a core corporate position which would need to be discussed and approved internally first. And guess what, Sun have since done that and the result is a unilateral patent right grant of all Sun's patents which are relevant to any code released under the CDDL, which, by recent public account, should include all of the core OS/Net portion of Solaris, and more, by next month[2]. (And the CDDL is a fairly liberal licence, so that means both code implementing those patents and the patent grant will be available to lots of Open Source code. Even GPL code, if the GPL copyright holder gives an exception to allow linkage).

But I guess far easier to take "We reserve our rights" and spin that into "They're evil!" than to use one faculties to examine all the information and opinions with a critical eye (including the FUD) and see whether it stands up. (No offence intended, I simply feel a lot of the FUD wouldn't stand up if one were to examine it more closely).

That's exciting, even if you don't use or care for Solaris, simply because it is generally good for Unix (in the generic sense, ie including Linux). Every Unix implementation benefits from the competition which is provided by other healthy implementations. Every Unix you look at, you'll probably find features there which came from some other. Not to mention the huge body of general software which is portable between them. And quite a lot of now common Unix features were originated by Sun (I forgot things like PAM and NSS from my previous list, and there are surely more ;) ).

And I really don't think you can deny the ambivalence Sun has about Linux and really FOSS in general.

FOSS in general: Sorry, Sun are quite supportive of FOSS imho. Linux: Well Sun think Solaris is better, what would you expect :), other than that I dont think Sun have a problem with Linux. Commercial competition from Linux-pushing companies like RedHat and IBM? Never mind ambivalent, Sun very much intend to battle as hard as it takes! :).

The ambivalence possibly arises from confusion on Sun's position between these various strands (FOSS, Linux, commercial and pure business competition). And yes, some of that confusion likely arose out of early confusion by Sun in distinguishing between those 3 seperate things. I think that confusion is gone now though.

• FOSS: Good!
• Linux: Solaris better :)
• RedHat/IBM/et al: the competition!

Clearer? :)

The best and easiest thing Sun's upper management could do for their image is to pick a story and stick to it. At least we could know what to think instead of necessity forcing us to assume the worst.

I agree. I think Sun management have realised this already. Hopefully the 'message' from Sun exec's the last while has been clearer, and will remain so[1].

It isn't hard to imagine scenarios in which a Sun in dire straits turns to the lawsuit lottery to stay afloat.

That seems quite an unlikely scenario to me.

1. Note that I've never before been employed by a company where I feel I could be that candid in public about my boss's boss's boss's boss's :).