September 16th, 2004
Did Sun sell out OpenOffice?
In what seems to be one of the more bizarre and confusing aspects of the unholy alliance between Sun and Microsoft, Sun’s recent 10k filing includes previously unseen legalese from the settlement agreement.
In one part of the settlement, the companies agreed not to sue each other or their respective customers for any patent infringement alleged to have taken place before the deal was signed and going forward for up to 10 years, so long as Microsoft continues to pay Sun annual extension fees. The agreement specifically excludes licensees of OpenOffice from that protection. According to the OpenOffice.org Web site, OpenOffice is licensed under a dual license strategy that involves the GNU General Public License and the Sun Industry Standards Source License.
So basically, the settlement includes a provision explicitly preserving Microsoft’s right to sue licensees of OpenOffice, while indemnifying Sun from any lawsuits relating to StarOffice — Sun’s commercial implementation of the open source project. This could be more evidence of what David Berlind has asserted before: that Sun appears to be taking an increasingly anti-Linux posture. In this case, one that creates the sort of legal uncertainty that could dampen corporate enthusiasm for one of desktop Linux’s most promising open source projects as well as any Linux distros that are bundled with it (ie: Red Hat or Novell SuSE Linux). Need we ask who benefits from such dampened enthusiam? So, where’s Jonathan’s blog post on this topic?
