I was looking through patents authored by Lars Bak, when I realized a lot of them cover components of the the Sun JVM, HotSpot, etc. Now that parts Sun's stack is being released under FLOSS licenses, how does this affect people who are forking or using forks of this open source software? Are they not in violation of Sun's patents?
+4
A:
No, because Sun grants a license to the patents too. I don't know the details, but I can tell you (as someone who has Sun patents and has gone through the open source process) that it's not easy to get through the legal hoops. But it can be done.
Charlie Martin
2009-03-31 01:34:18
A:
Technically, you would be violating their patents, however Mr. Martin is right about the rest. Sun would/should grant a license for the respective patents to those using the open source software.
Sun basically chooses not to enforce their patent rights in those cases.
Jordan L. Walbesser
2009-03-31 01:54:39
+1
A:
Lars Bak told that (at least) the V8 Javascript VM can be used free of patent claims (personal communication after a talk of his at ETH Zurich in 2009).
Adrian
2009-11-26 02:55:16
+1
A:
As you can see with the lawsuit of Oracle against Google over the Dalvik-VM in Android, these patents can be used against alternative Java-implementations released as Open-Source.
Mnementh
2010-08-30 12:26:10