Re: What are tainted developers allowed to work on?

[zander]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 04:43:25PM +0000, Nic Ferrier wrote:
> 
> >> In the meantime I did manage to elicit this statement from a Sun engineer,
> >> while talking about something other than JCK:
> >> 
> >>         "Regarding independant VM's, people are free to use the Java
> >> Specifications for R&D non-commercial use but as soon as they make use
> >> of the code for commercial use then they have to take a license from
> >> Sun.  The so called "CleanRoom" implementations of VM's are in fact not
> >> clean as they are based on the Java Specification which is Sun's IP.
> >> Therefore before making use of this commercially they should license
> >> from Sun the test suites to ensure compliance."
> 
> Can they actually make that stick? Surely the specification, if
> published, is open?

This is about as legal as Intel claiming all applications running on their
processors are theirs (or need their licence) since the i386 'language' is
their IP.  This reasing is quite silly from a legal POV since IP is either
not distributed at all, or distributed with a (copyright) licence which
is a contract.  At that point no generalisations like above can be made
without actually looking and interpreting that contract.

I'm going to trust the FSF on this one, and not a Sun engineer which implies
he's not a laywer.

-- 
Thomas Zander

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