Where do I begin?

[Per Bothner]

> Sheer FUD I'd call that.  If you don't break the copyright, you don't
> have a problem.  That's the purpose and intent of the law.

Wrong. It is not just copyright law that comes into effect,
it is also trade secret law.  You can defend yourself against
copyright claims if you can show that the "expression" of the
algorithms is not derived from Sun's code.  However, that is
kind of nebulous, and we would rather avoid it.  Things are even
more nebulous when it comes to trade secrets.  In any case, it
is a lot easier to defend yourself legally if you have not signed
Sun's license and/or studied their code.

> But I'm not of the view that commercial organizations define the terms under
> which open source development occurs.

It's whoever does the actually work who gets to define the terms.
Which of the two of us have written and released more free software?
Beggers don't get to be choosers.

	--Per Bothner
Cygnus Solutions     bothner at cygnus.com     http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner