Jonathan Explains

When Microsoft threatened to sue the world over unspecified Microsoft proprietary code in FLOSS projects, it pretty much ceded the moral high ground to -- well, to anybody else.

OK, maybe anybody but SCO.

So it was hardly surprising when last week Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz offered some 'Free Advice for the Litigious' in his blog.

That advice included the claim that 'in excess of 25 percent of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution' was contributed by Sun. He even linked to a document to prove it.

Reading the document, however, reveals the following interesting statement:

Sun alone, in particular, is credited with 30 percent of the total code contribution in our sample, which highlights one of the flaws inherent in the technique used for identifying company code contribution, which is based on copyright credits. In the case of Sun, most of its contribution is accounted for by OpenOffice, for which Sun holds the copyright. The entire codebase of OpenOffice is not, in fact, Sun’s sole creation, but contributors -- individuals and other firms, small and big -- sign an agreement assigning Sun joint copyright of their contributions, in order to simplify licensing and liability management.

The way I read that, Jonathan is taking credit for code that Sun employees didn't write and claiming a commitment to open source software based mainly on copyrights that Sun holds.

I'm never going to understand intellectual property.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:57 PM  Permalink