JDK7 with lambda's downloadable

[Mark Wielaard]

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 15:07 -0700, Neal Gafter wrote:
> You've asked for feedback on the implementation in this forum.  In what
> forum do you plan to offer a patent grant allowing us to do so?

Although I appreciate your concerns seeing Oracle's patent aggression
against another Free Software project, Brian is right. You seem to not
want to read what Brian said and is literally in the GPL ("we have made
it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use"). And
what Sun/Oracle told us earlier about the broad interpretation of rights
granted.

This is the wrong time to ask Oracle for clarification, since they are
currently in a patent fight with Google. Their case is probably very
weak precisely because they granted such broad patent rights for
everyone's free use through the GPL with OpenJDK. But you cannot expect
their corporate lawyers to acknowledge that while the court case is
playing out.

Go do what Sun/Oracle told you in the past, read the GPL carefully, ask
the FSF for an interpretation of the GPL to know what rights have been
granted and/or consult your own/Microsoft's counsel to confirm. That is
what I and others did in the past to make clear that we have the
necessary rights.

If you want to update and clarify the SCA with respect to making the
patent grant explicitly reciprocal, and not just rely on the GPL for a
grantback, which I do think is a good idea, then take this up on the
main discuss list. But leave the lambda-dev list for those wanting to
coordinate hacking.

Cheers,

Mark