Mono, gcj, java, c++, what?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 08/29/2010 05:55 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> Google *wants* to fight over it. They're going to say that since sun
> released proprietary software under GPL, it invalidates their patents.
> Oracle inherited all this from sun, and oracle is going to say, that they
> have patented technology that they chose to allow for free public use,
> under certain conditions, and google chose to use it anyway under
> different conditions.
> 
> If google wins, it will strongly discourage other proprietary softwares from
> being released under GPL, or any open source license.

I highly doubt that Google would argue that line of reasoning.  Companies
give royalty-free-but-restricted-in-some-ways licenses to their patents all
the time (recent example: MPEG-LA's H.264 patents;
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368359,00.asp).  It's pretty well
established that doing so does not invalidate the patent (you can trust that
MPEG-LA wouldn't do anything to put their patent-trolling at risk).

Google should, before moving on to other arguments, challenge the validity
of the patents themselves.  They could win just by getting all the patents
in question invalidated.  In fact, two of the four possible defenses in a
patent-infringement suit involve invalidating the patent:
 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_282.htm

Matt