On May 27, 2009, at 9:04 AM, Sam Johnston wrote:
Here's hoping we'll see something from both Sun and GoGrid in due course.
Normally, this is the kind of thing that Sun's been very good at. There's some correspondence going around, internally. At this point, however, anything that represents a nontrivial corporate commitment is probably needs routing through the Sun-Oracle integration team; those guys are all about distilling sanity out of Oracle's 80k headcount as combined with Sun's 30k, and are possibly the most overworked group on the planet right now. So, probably count on delays. Hey, if someone from Oracle wanted to speak up pre-emptively...
FWIW the OGF IPR policy is drawn into the membership agreement so member companies are covered across the board...
Does our having signed up to this make any difference? Thijs? Alexis? And I hate to end on a cynical note, but in practice this whole patent- coverage exercise probably doesn't mean a damn thing. Anyone with exposure to the dismal universe of software patents would probably agree with my guess that there are tons of 'em out there covering every little aspect of anything we might do, many held by people who aren't OGF members or haven't even heard of "Cloud Computing" at this point. Yes, it's nice when people who are *in the process* do non- asserts, and I support that. But typically those people aren't the problem. But there is good news, too. Unlike the situation in the hardware world, I'm not aware of anyone ever having successfully set up a patent-based tollbooth on a software-only Internet protocol deployment. FWIW, my own position: RAND is 100% unacceptable because it rules out open-source solutions. Protocols which require any kind of licensing whatsoever cannot be used on the Internet. -Tim