Re: What are tainted developers allowed to work on?

[Nic Ferrier]

Sascha Brawer <address@hidden> writes:

> On Jan 10, 2005, at 5:11 PM, Dalibor Topic wrote:
>
>> People wanting their implementations to be compatible with Sun is a 
>> no-brainer, even without a stick, as otherwise one couldn't run the 
>> existing code out there.
>
> I'm actually not so sure about this one. For free software hackers, the 
> answer surely is yes, but remember Microsoft's JVM?

Let's correct this quickly: Sun did not stop MS making a VM. They
eventually got a court to agree that MS could not call it Java in a
particular way that made carrying on with the VM useless to MS.

But Sun couldn't stop MS from making a VM.

For the same reason GNU don't call GCJ or Classpath
"GNU-Java". Because if GNU called GCJ or Classpath "GNU-Java" then
Sun's lawyers would have us over a barrell.


I think the story about the Sun engineer is either mistaken somewhere
or is from a Sun  engineer with no understanding of (c). I doubt it's
someone very senior.


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk