The OpenJDK has a different license agreement compared to the regular JDK. However, they both have license agreements in the first place.
What google did, is not use anything with a license from oracle attached to it. If they HAD used the OpenJDK, and probably if they had used the regular JDK (I'm not a lawyer, I can't make heads or tails of those EULAs), oracle would have had a HARDER time suing them. Licenses don't just give you legal obligations, they can give you legal rights as well. The GPL license, in particular, appears to give you a bunch of legal _rights_ in regards to having the freedom to not be sued for breach of patents just because you are using the software. Or not. You should read the GPL and/or talk to your lawyers to be sure. Clearly NOT using any licensed oracle products does NOT indemnify you from getting used by them: In fact, google did NOT use any licensed oracle products, and has been following the very advice being given in this thread, and they got sued. How anyone can claim doing the same thing google did is going to protect you from being sued boggles the mind. Possibly I'm missing some legal nuance here; I am not a lawyer after all. But if so, would those giving this kind of advice explain what I'm missing? Because from where I'm standing, the legally safest route is to stick to the regular/OpenJDK. NB: My opinions on what is prudent under law here, the laws that have made it possible for oracle to sue in the first place, and the wisdom of this path from Oracle's perspective are all entirely separate from what I just said. FWIW, based on what I know at the moment, this move appears to be a bad one for Oracle. The judge should throw this out, and the US legal system should be ashamed of itself for even making this farce of case possible. Wishing the law wasn't so crazy, or Ellison so blind to what developers care about doesn't make it so, however, and I presume that most of the folks here would rather avoid getting sued instead of standing on principle and ending up bankrupt. On Sep 3, 2:12 pm, Jan Goyvaerts <[email protected]> wrote: > Otherwise back to the point: Is there a particular advantage to use OpenJDK > over the regular JDK ? Maybe OpenJDK is - well - open, but it's still Oracle > that is paying the contributors. So, in the end, what difference would it > make ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
