Patent Grant (original) (raw)

Jonathan Tripathy jonnyt at abpni.co.uk
Mon Nov 21 12:34:19 UTC 2011


Hi Everyone,

I'm aware that OpenJDK is released under the GPLv2, which has an implicit patent grant. However I'm curious about the explicit patent grant given by Oracle when an implementation passed the TCK test.

I'm aware that OpenJDK has passed the Community TCK tests (Which doesn't have any field of use clauses). Does this mean that an explicit patent grant is given to OpenJDK?

The grant is here: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/jdk-6u21-doc-license.txt

My concerns are with this paragraph:

  1. Definitions. For the purposes of this Agreement: "Independent Implementation" shall mean an implementation of the Specification that neither derives from any of Sun's source code or binary code materials nor, except with an appropriate and separate license from Sun, includes any of Sun's source code or binary code materials

OpenJDK is obviously Sun's code, so I'm a little confused here. Does this mean the patent grant doesn't apply? Or maybe the GPLv2 is the "appropriate and separate license".

Thanks



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