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Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 02:02 PM EDT |
Oracle (Sun) joined in a legal contract with Apache in the JCP, Java
Specification Participation Agreement once the agreement had been extended to
give permission for third party implementation of the API Specification. Oracle
(Oracle) were also a party to the agreement.
One assumes that the JSPA would not have had small print saying that Harmony
could implement the Specification, but there was no licence for anyone to use
the implementation!
There must have been tacit agreement among the whole JCP membership, including
Sun and Oracle, that Apache could licence the Apache implementation under the
Apache licence or else Apache would not have joined the JCP and Sun would not
have let them.
Now, this.
The GPL can only be offered by the copyright holder. I would want to see how the
OpenJDK was released under the GPL but, if each class is released as an
independent GPL file (as it has to be for Java technical reasons) then I cannot
see how Oracle can stop Google from using and redistributing all the 51 that
they need. Copyright is copyright and the licence is the licence.
Oracle would find it very hard to assert a compilation work or a collective work
copyright over the whole 166 and claim that using one quarter is infringing on
those copyrights especially when they have licensed all the copyright creative
expression in all of the files under the GPL. They know that the GPL, which they
chose as a licence, prohibits any further limitations. If they wanted further
limitations then they should not have chosen the GPL.
Mind you, that is, more or less, just what they have got away with in this case.
Each API class compilable code file is an independent file with its own
copyright. The judge is allowing Oracle to assert copyright over a compilation
of thousands upon thousands of individual copyright files. It is a complete
nonsense. No wonder the jury does not know what to make of it.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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