courtroom observations re: java test certification beef
"lawsuits? i prefer gabardine." -- d. van vliet
question of the day:
"What makes them think that they don't
have to pass the certification tests, anyway"
as a curious peanut gallery attendee of the sun/microsoft java suit
fracas at the northern california district court in san jose,
i think i can relay the gist of the argument.
microsoft claims that the TDLA would never have been negotiated
unless rights to create "derivative works" were granted, and that
this right usurps any testing restrictions. indeed, from section 2.1
appearing at:
javasoft.com
archetypal boilerplate intones:
a.SUN hereby grants to Licensee, and Licensee hereby
accepts from SUN, a perpetual and irrevocable
(without regard to any termination or expiration of this
Agreement, except as provided in Section 11.2(b)), worldwide,
non-exclusive,non-transferable license, under the Intellectual
Property Rights of SUN to make, access, use, copy, view,
display, modify, adapt, and create Derivative Works of the
Technology [....]
looks reasonable & comprehensive, and makes for good adversarial
puffery until you read and interpret the fine print later on:
[....] in Source Code form for the purposes of developing,
compiling to binary form and supporting Products;
the innocuous looking filip in this section (and later ones)
makes abundantly clear that these are *development* rights, not
*distribution* rights. there's much legalese which expands
upon such, showing that sun regards microsoft merely a distribution
conduit for their IP.
suffice it to say that sun would have never agreed to the TDLA
unless distribution of their trademarked, copyrighted, and patented
code was accompanied by rigorous (and legally controlling)
certification tests.
naturally, this is not wildly different than what microsoft
does [or would do if they ever deigned to] vis-a-vis licensing
of their windows 95/98/NT APIs... |
