A Sun spokesperson told ComputerWire yesterday: Sun will not sue the open source community.
Sun was forced to comment after non-profit legal pressure group, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), raised what the group considered to be serious questions about the rights granted to developers under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
Free and open source software developers must have clear answers… so they can understand what rights they have to Sun’s parents, PUBPAT executive director Dan Ravicher wrote in an open letter to Sun chairman and chief executive Scott McNealy.
Ravicher advised open source developers to be very careful of CDDL and not be mislead by Sun. The warning comes as Sun plans to release elements of middleware stack under CDDL, including reportedly the year-old Java Enterprise System (JES).
Ravicher’s chief concern over CDDL is that Sun has retained the right to bring parent infringement claims against developers who modify software licensed by Sun under the CDDL.
Sun last week released 1,600 patents in a blaze of publicity under CDDL, covering technologies in the latest version of the company’s Solaris operating system.
Ravicher accused Sun of making sweeping statements about developer access to the 1,600 patents, while the legal nitty-gritty showed Sun had retained the right to aim its entire patent portfolio at GNU, Linux and other free software and open source operating systems.
PUBPAT made a minor name for itself last year, by challenging Microsoft’s patent claims over patents the company claims to hold in the ubiquitous File Allocation Table (FAT). Last October, the US Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) threw out Microsoft’s FAT patent, calling the patent being unpatentable and citing existence of prior art.
