Mono, gcj, java, c++, what?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 08/29/2010 10:01 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> On 08/29/2010 05:55 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> Google *wants* to fight over it. They're going to say that since sun
>> released proprietary software under GPL, it invalidates their patents.
>> Oracle inherited all this from sun, and oracle is going to say, that they
>> have patented technology that they chose to allow for free public use,
>> under certain conditions, and google chose to use it anyway under
>> different conditions.
>>
>> If google wins, it will strongly discourage other proprietary softwares from
>> being released under GPL, or any open source license.
> 
> I highly doubt that Google would argue that line of reasoning.  Companies
> give royalty-free-but-restricted-in-some-ways licenses to their patents all
> the time (recent example: MPEG-LA's H.264 patents;
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368359,00.asp).  It's pretty well
> established that doing so does not invalidate the patent (you can trust that
> MPEG-LA wouldn't do anything to put their patent-trolling at risk).
> 
> Google should, before moving on to other arguments, challenge the validity
"...in other ways (e.g. most appear to have lots of prior art)." is how I
intended to end that sentence.