On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 12:53 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Wednesday 07 November 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > >Gene Heskett wrote: > >> I haven't really exercised it (2.3.0) all that much but what I've done was > >> done exactly as I expected. Eg, it Just Worked(TM). > >> > >> To Rahul: Are there concerns re patents that make RH pull stuff out of > >> OOo? > > > >There was a mix of stuff. Some Java portions used to not work well with > >GCJ. There was concern over patents in other features. Sun has a patent > >cross licensing agreement with Microsoft that makes them immune to these > >problems so it might be that they wouldn't care but if affects everybody > >else including end users who don't use Staroffice (which gets some kind > >of patent license as a commercial product). > > > >Rahul > > In defense of that, it might be enlightening to take a survey and see how many > folks try to use the java tools fedora supplies vs folks that dl and install > their java directly from sun. I'm in the probably 95% column that did that. > And it Just Works(TM). > > That's not saying you (speaking as RH) are wrong, but that is how many will > perceive it, they somehow expecting RH to shoulder the legal liability for > that and which is not at all realistic to ask. It appears to us that it is > perfectly legal for us to do so however, so we don't always accept that > condescension quietly. > > The only place where I have a personal distaste is that when we do that, then > RH/Fedora seems to want to say that we are the sinners in this nearly > religious perfect adherence to the GPL. As users, we just want it to work, > and TBT it does. > > Can you imagine the hoorah that would be created if sun (or M$ for that > matter) were to go after each of us JRE downloaders individually? I suspect > that would ultimately cause the demise of 'the big bad wolf' regardless of > the security pass on the left breast pocket's issuer, and they damned well > know it. I'd think it would also be laughed out of court as entrapment > because its freely offered for download, fully customized to run on linux. ---- I hate it when you misinform... the big issue with Sun's JRE is that there was a restrictive license and even though they have been transferring all of the bits to GPL, some parts have been stragglers and preventing large scale adoption into a GPL distribution. There is no one to sue, there never was a problem with liability, incorrectness nor any problem other than Sun's java was never fully, completely GPL licensed...apparently that's complete now. Craig
