On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even [then-CEO] Jonathan [Schwartz]: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.
Then he also does not understand the GPL.
From the GPL Version 2 preamble:
"Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
They made Java GPL, not me.
You are oversimplifying things here. The phone version of java was never GPL'd. and that is the part that google reverse-engineered . On the other hand, API's can't really be protected because they are two sides of the same thing. If a user is allowed to use one side, someone else has to be allowed to duplicate the other side. Without that concept, linux and the *bsds would never be allowed to duplicate the unix APIs.