You should have as much fear as if you are using linux. I would say that US companies might have a larger probability of getting in such a mad situation because of the intensive B to B court tradition.
Anyway, SUN was the home of opensource, they cannot change the past. living in the edge ;-) Cheers On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:26 PM, David Brodbeck <bro...@uw.edu> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Largo <splat...@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 > _______________________________________________ > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
