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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

It just goes to show that whatever company-de-jour promises about enforcing the patents that they are granted today, all bets are off when they fall on hard times and are acquired tomorrow.

Serious about openness? Skip the "patent and promise" dance and just release the damn thing BSD.

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That is why you would license it under the Apache License, because it has explicit patent clauses, rather than something like the BSD license.

The BSD license would be useless here. Preventing this kind of thing is the whole point of the third revision of the GPL; to my knowledge there are no other software licenses that do this.

See LGPLv2 section 11.

No, GPLv3 is useless here.

Oracle can sue for patents over any GPLv3 technology, and all GPLv3 says is that the company doing the suing can't distribute code under GPLv3.

But since they own the copyrights of Java, they can always change its license and leave the rest of the world in dust.

Uhh, no.

They would be violating the GPLv3 license under which they distributed the source. Changing the license only affects the next person acquiring the source. The people who acquired it under the GPLv3 license cannot have this retroactively revoked or relicensed. If Orcale sued those parties, they would be violating the terms of the license. In the least instance they shouldn't have been distributing the source unde GPLv3 so their claim for infringement would be moot.

How would BSD help? It doesn't include a patent license.

Skip the "patent and promise" dance and just release the damn thing BSD and forget about patents. (Implied, should have specified)

If you already have patents (as Sun did in this case) you can't just forget about them. Saying nothing about patents is equivalent to saying "some day we'll change our mind and start suing". If you want to make something really open you really need some kind of irrevocable license or promise not to sue.

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