Jeff Gould

July 1, 2009

Oracle, do the right thing, set Java free

To nearly everyone’s surprise, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has thrown a last-minute banana peel in front of Larry Ellison’s bid to buy Sun and Java.
Oracle is about to acquire Sun’s monumental collection of Java intellectual property rights. This includes the patents and copyrights to the code embodied in the Java platform editions (EE, SE and ME) and in dozens of critical Java standards (JSRs) associated with the platforms, as well as the all-important test suites (JCKs and TCKs) that determine what software can claim compatibility with these standards and thus receive these IP rights.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Java community to wrest some concessions from the new owner of Java before the deal is set in stone.

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Friday
09May

How one vendor learned to stop worrying (about open source) and love Microsoft

By Eric Lai (Computerworld)
Aras Corp. was a small, struggling software maker that stirred up a hornet's nest early last year, when it made a pair of seemingly contradictory decisions.
First, the Andover, Mass.-based company made its expensive — we're talking up to a million dollars for a single license — product life-cycle management (PLM) software available on a free and open-source basis.
Second, rather than trying to curry favor with the mainstream open-source community by making even a vague commitment to port its software to Linux, Aras said outright that it would continue developing only for Windows. And instead of distributing its wares through a mechanism such as the GNU General Public License, the company decided to use one of Microsoft's so-called shared-source licenses, which at the time had yet to be accepted by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as legitimate open-source licenses.
The reaction, unsurprisingly, wasn't favorable.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083918&intsrc=news_ts_head

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