Fabrizio Giudici's Blog

Microsoft's attitude towards open-source...

The news is circulating since a few days, but I was suprised to not see discussions about it but in a few forums.

It should reveal the real Microsoft's attitude towards open source (think of .NET, Mono, SilverLight etc...) - no criticism here, I believe in freedom, including the right of corporates to pursue their own strategies.

But when we, weaker or stronger opensource advocates, criticize Sun, let's take things in the right perspective. Sun makes mistakes, as any human-made thing or organization does. But not only it's the bigger opensource donor - AFAIK it has never tried to shut down opensource competitors by means of a patent war.

Comments

• Speaking of patents, i never hear about Sun applying for a patent. How many patents does Sun actually have (in hardware and software), compared with, say, Apple, IBM and Microsoft?

  Posted by: kirillcool on May 18, 2007 at 12:57 PM

• Here is Sun's patent list, as of a couple months ago. Sun uses patents for defensive purposes (indemnifying customers from patent threats, for example). Sun has never to my knowledge filed a software patent lawsuit, and the only hardware patent lawsuit involved a fab manufacturer stamping out SPARC chips using an unchanged patented die mask (piracy, basically).

  Posted by: tball on May 18, 2007 at 09:50 PM

• Could I suggest that Sun's recent behaviour towards Apache Harmony constitutes 'attempting to shut down an open source competitor by means of patents'. (Until Harmony passes the TCK it does not get the patent grants).[Disclaimer - I'm an ASF member, speaking here in a personal capacity.]

  Posted by: scolebourne on May 19, 2007 at 01:03 PM

• It's a spicy affair and there are different opinions around. I just recall that some commenter argued about IBM behind Apache and trying to get the control of Java - I mean, things are often more complex than they appear. Being not a Sun employee I don't know what's going on behind the scenes and am not able to comment on the point.

  In spite of being a questionable affair, even if Sun wasn't willing to get to an agreement - which I don't believe, but only time will tell - Harmony would be given some difficulty not shut down (I mean, it could not brand itself as "Java", which won't prevent it to spread if it's a good product).

  Summing up, even I'd say it's a weaker case and most probably it's only a temporary issue.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on May 19, 2007 at 01:32 PM

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