Sun, following in IBM's footsteps, have announced the company will grant open source projects access to over 1,600 patents, the largest single release of I.P. ever. Sun CEO Scott McNealy said "Today represents a huge milestone for Sun, for the community, for developers and for customers."
In a statement today, Sun said that they were allowing access to increase innovation and to level the playing field to software developers. They also commented that the move was in reaction to their growing concern at broad patents over software code, and an over-worked international patent system. The company appeared to be agreeing with a growing view that the system needs serious reform to continue working effectively and in the manner they were originally intended. Sun hope that this move will also reduce customer concerns about potential liability from using Open Source software.
Stacey Quandt, a Senior Business Analyst at The Robert Frances Group said "By gaining access to these Solaris OS patents, participants in the open-source community now have a tremendous opportunity to build unique and innovative technologies for a wide range of markets. An IP contribution of this magnitude has the potential to deliver exceptional value to developers and strengthens the overall open source community."
Sun said that the patents being offered ranged from kernel technology to network management, as well as newer Sun technology like anticipated Dynamic Tracing. The patents are being offered under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Exactly how useful the access will be to developers is un-known; nor exactly how self-interested this move really is. The patent release comes as part of Sun's efforts to completely open source the Solaris operating system.
View: Sun Homepage
In a statement today, Sun said that they were allowing access to increase innovation and to level the playing field to software developers. They also commented that the move was in reaction to their growing concern at broad patents over software code, and an over-worked international patent system. The company appeared to be agreeing with a growing view that the system needs serious reform to continue working effectively and in the manner they were originally intended. Sun hope that this move will also reduce customer concerns about potential liability from using Open Source software.
Stacey Quandt, a Senior Business Analyst at The Robert Frances Group said "By gaining access to these Solaris OS patents, participants in the open-source community now have a tremendous opportunity to build unique and innovative technologies for a wide range of markets. An IP contribution of this magnitude has the potential to deliver exceptional value to developers and strengthens the overall open source community."
Sun said that the patents being offered ranged from kernel technology to network management, as well as newer Sun technology like anticipated Dynamic Tracing. The patents are being offered under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Exactly how useful the access will be to developers is un-known; nor exactly how self-interested this move really is. The patent release comes as part of Sun's efforts to completely open source the Solaris operating system.
View: Sun Homepage
What's New in This Release:
1 View/change XP Key
2 View/Change MS office Key
3 View Win98 Key
4 view Win2000 Key
5 View .Net Key
6 View Win2003 Key
7 Back up WinXP Activation
8 Save Your Product Key By Encrypting It
9 Generate Unique Passwords By Entering your Combination of KeyCode
10 and many More
And for this year, after they fired over 30% of their programers(2 years ago), they are pretty much in a good shape, they even hiring back programmers.
We may be starting to see the beginnings of a paradigm shift in the computing world.
Why not? (just out of curiosity).
Software shouldn't be free (computers are not so why should software be?)and the source code that someone spent many many hours on should be his own personal property.
Ahh sounds like a scared commercial developer to me. The answer is simple however, just make better software. Competition is always good. The only thing it is bad for are the people it squeezes out
Bucko there are things called education licences also you'll learn that you can't always have what you want if you cannot afford it.
e.g. MS Office Standard 2003 Academic Boxed Product £105.98
Jason I've already learned that, that's why I use Linux.
As a sysadmin, he will still be getting paid for his work in an Open Source world. In fact, others who write software get paid for their work, too (like OO.o writers are paid by Sun, Linux kernel writers are paid by IBM, Red Hat, Novell and others). Sure there are people who write in bits for free because they want to fix a bug, or add a feature. Some may ever just enjoy coding all day long (those are the stererotypical 'Star Trek fans who never leave their parent's basement).
In the Open Source 'gift economy' model, the payment of the development work for one piece of software is made, and the return on this 'investment' is made when others add features, too. Plus, you get to also use a wide variety of other apps you may not have performed development work on, but get to freely use - for example, an OO.o developer gets to freely use the Linux kernel, Apache webserver, MySQL and PHP to perhaps host his site that he shares his work on. Payment 10-fold for a bit of work helping the community on another project.
The computing paradigm shifted from proprietary hardware to commodity hardware with IBM's PC and it's open archetecture. And it has been good, as it made personal computing possible and affordable. The same might start to take place in software, as well. Even today there is a place for the proprietary computing hardware (we have many robots where I work that use a custom computer to run), and the future will hold a place for proprietary computing sofware, as well. Open Source will not take over 100% of software, but can be a hugely significant market in the next 10 years.
--Alex
they even are going to make Solaris and Java to be open source by the end of the summer. Yet, they will develop these projects them self, and not make an open source community to develop those for them.
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