Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 17:22:13 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <alk@pobox.com> To: nate@mt.sri.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Where is the FreeBSD Mozilla CVS server? Message-ID: <199804112222.RAA06587@pobox.com> References: <199804111653.LAA05849@pobox.com> <199804112029.OAA24098@mt.sri.com>
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Quoth Nate Williams on Sat, 11 April: : Sure it does. Go read the license that you signed in order to get : access to the source code. If you want to do anything commercial (which : includes making a $$, even if you're not the one making a $$), then : you've gotta pay sun a pretty tidy sum of money. Last I heard it was : close to a million dollars. But that doesn't really bear upon the issue of licensees writing new code of their own. : Even if you don't use Sun code, you are 'tainted' from working on : writing a different VM. This is basic Reverse Engineering 101. The : folks who look at the code aren't allowed to write the code for the new : implementation. This is not a term of the Sun license, however. It is merely one way to preclude being effectively charged with "theft" of intellectual property. Another way to defend yourself against such a charge is simply not to "steal" any intellectual property. I can't speak for Sun, but I don't think it's realistic to believe that Sun has any reason to sue someone who does *not* use Sun's code, since they would be unlikely to win, for one thing, and since even if they were to win, they would be unlikely to gain financially as a result -- indeed, quite the opposite! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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