Sun recently got some exposure by claiming to give away 1600 patents for use by Open Source programmers. It took a couple of weeks, but the catch has finailly been revealed. It isn’t all Open Source programmers that get to use the patents. Only programmers that sign up to use Suns new CCDL license are protected. Any GPL licenced programmers are out in the cold. As Dan Ravicher of PubPat.org said:
“My advice is that developers should ask themselves if they really want to work on software distributed by a company that has expressly retained the right to sue them for patent infringement if they don’t give their improvements back to the company.”
This isn’t about helping Open Source, this is about Sun losing Solaris market share to Linux and deciding to try and steal some of the OSS programmers by promising them the world. This is hardly a fair move from a company that sells and uses much Open Source GPL code as part of their enterprise desktop and indeed their server product also includes some GPL code. The response by the OSS community has so far not been good. Read more at Groklaw.
