[OpenIndiana-discuss] Legal Safety

Largo splatter at proinbox.com
Fri Mar 25 18:22:17 UTC 2011


Is OpenIndiana safe from patent lawsuits from Oracle?

Could it happen to a company using an Illuminos distro like OpenIndiana,
that one  day Oracle lawyers will knock on the door and demand that they
pay for a commercial Solaris license?

Microsoft has been claiming for a while now that Linux violates MS patents
despite the fact that the Linux code has very little to do with Windows.
I have also heard Microsoft has tried to extort money from companies 
using Linux,
in exchange for safety from MS patens lawsuits

Considering the piles of money Oracle demands for Solaris licences it seems
unlikely that they will just look silently at how free Illuminos distros 
take
customers from them and do nothing about it.

I know that most of the OI code is covered by open source licences like 
CDDL
but that doesn't protect you from software patent lawsuits as far as I 
am aware.

Are there any lawyers who have analyzed this situation?



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