Re: [office] ODF Reciprocal License Allegation

To Michael, Gary, et al,

  I'm forwarding this to the TC list on behalf of Eduardo Gutentag.

Regards,

Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: Eduardo Gutentag [mailto:] 
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 8:54 PM
To: Mary McRae
Subject: Re: [office] ODF Reciprocal License Allegation

Mary, since I am only an Observer of the Office TC, could you please forward this to Gary and the rest of the TC, written in my
capacity of Sun's primary representative to OASIS? Thank you.

---------------------------------------------

Gary, others,

can you spell FUD? Yes, I knew you could ;)

There are a few things that should be made clear, since the goal of FUD is always to make things unclear.

What Sun posted as an IPR promise in 2002, as anyone in this field knows, including Brian, was a conventional short form assurance
that, if we turned to have any patents that read on the specification, we would license them RF.
We have never turned up any patents reading on the specification, so there has been no need to compose, let alone grant, a license.
(Let me remind you that the issue here is an XML schema, not software; the very idea of patenting and enforcing patents against
schemas is really more someone else's style and idea of fun than Sun's.)

The whole point of that assurance was to voluntarily remove FUD, by making it clear there would be no licensing obstacles.

We have all come a long way since 2002.  After some aggressive uses of asserted patents and sub-licensing issues-- again, not from
us -- the open source communities are now very cautious about precise license terms. This is actually good. And many vendor
companies have also become more sensitive to the needs of the open source communities. This is even better.

To make implementors' analysis actually simpler, we at Sun are dotting the i's and crossing the t's on something which will be made
public sometime hopefully within the next few days and that we believe will satisfy everybody. Well, almost everybody; certainly not
those who are spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

By the way, those criticisms about reciprocity and sub-licensing are flat wrong.
On sublicensing, they looked at the wrong rules. The 2000 OASIS IPR policy that governs OpenDocument has no sublicensing bar. Their
conments about reciprocity were so far off as to be surreal. Yes, Sun reserved a reciprocity right; so does Microsoft; so does
everyone else in this industry. It's a non-issue and no obstacle to free (or otherwise) software. We could go much deeper into the
tedious details if needed, but it's not needed. There's no real issue here.
Only made-up ones.

On 09/26/2005 08:39 AM, Gary Edwards wrote: