[OpenIndiana-discuss] Legal Safety

[David Brodbeck]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Largo <splatter at proinbox.com> wrote:

> Is OpenIndiana safe from patent lawsuits from Oracle?
>

Technically nothing is ever safe from lawsuits.  People can sue for pretty
much any reason they want, especially corporations who have lawyers on
payroll.


>
> 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?
>

They could certainly try.  An interesting question is whether anyone would
fight them, or just choose the cheaper option of paying up.  Even if you'll
inevitably lose a suit if it's brought to trial, shaking people down with
the threat of one can be pretty lucrative.

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
>

I'd be interested in seeing references to that.  It's the first I've heard
of it. I'd think they'd want to avoid the loss of goodwill.

To me this all seems like speculation and FUD.  I'm not sure it's going to
lead to a useful discussion.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.)

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington