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Sorry, but you are wrong...Sorry, but you are wrong...Posted Aug 17, 2010 22:58 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: The consequences of avoiding GPL by jejb Parent article: A very grumpy editor's thoughts on Oracle
Section 7 (of GPLv2) is very clear what happens when you take enforcement actions on this: the licence terminates and the software becomes undistributable ... for everyone. s/for everyone/for everyone except Oracle/... Big difference! Remember copyright assignments? That's why they are there. Sun itself does not need to obey GPL. You'll need to visit courtroom to find out if you actually got the patent license or not and while it's very hard to imagine that court will declare that unmodified version need yet another separate patent license it's not so easy to say what the resolution will be WRT modified version. There are enough loopholes in GPLv2 to make such interpretation plausible and if you are sole owner then you interpretation almost by definition is more plausible then someone who read license once and decided not to ask about clarifications... If it came to a court battle on this point over some GPL derivative of Java, I'm pretty sure the entire GPL ecosystem would be lining up behind whoever had been threatened with a patent suit. My point is that this is currently not happening for Google because they chose not to be part of that ecosystem. Funny, my view is 180 degrees different: Google got as much support as TomTom which used GPLed linux kernel. People are searching for prior art, inventing creative ways to overthrow these patents... what Google was unable to get but TomTom got?
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