October 7th, 2004
Indemnity. It has its privileges.
Now that Sun has coughed up a cool $92 million to settle its intellectual property dispute with Kodak, perhaps the unofficial Java Needs to be Open Sourced Consortium is eating a bit of crow. For two years now, Sun has been trying to pay hommage to the open source community from which it was born while at the same time guarding the Java jewels. Citing its failure to open source Java or Solaris, critics have vilified Sun execs as hypocrites, and demanded release of "the prisoners." Pointing to other vendors’ failure (Red Hat and IBM in particular) to offer legal sanctuary (indemnification) to their customers however, Sun execs have routinely pleaded innocence saying it’s not so simple.
Now, licensees of Java — some of whom were Sun’s most vocal critics — are reaping the benefits of indemnification. Much the same way the open sourcing of OpenOffice may have put licensees of it at risk for infringement on Microsoft’s patents for MS-Office, use of an open sourced Java could easily have paved the way for Kodak to sue IBM, BEA, Oracle, JBoss and all of their customers at will (if any or all of them went with an open source licensing option before distributing or using Java). But Sun stood its ground, never open sourcing Java and now, because of that decision, its licensees of Java are 100 percent insulated from Kodak’s wrath because Sun picked up the tab. Said Marc Fleury of his inheritance of the protection that Sun bought (in what could be the understatement of the year), "Protection against patent lawsuits wasn’t the reason JBoss signed its Java license, but the umbrella is welcome." Welcome? How about, "Saved our asses." Fleury, the founder and CEO of JBoss, was one of the first to test Sun’s resolve when it came to enforcement of its Java intellectual property. He and Sun eventually resolved their differences and JBoss ended up with a license that afforded it the same protections that all other licensees of Java got. Sun’s coffers may be $92 million lighter. But it also appears to be legally standing 100 percent behind everything it says, and sells which is more than can be said of some other technologies and solution providers. Indemnity… it has its privileges. Indeed it does.
