Sure, a good looking press report, but Sun is only doing the ‘patent sharing’ with projects licensed under their own CDDL license. CDDL is the Mozilla license with one important thing removed: a clause permitting re-license under accepted open source licenses. As many people pointed out on Slashdot this morning: these patents can not be used in Linux.

More interesting news: I read this morning that IBM is likely to release a Linux license compatible Java runtime sooner than later. This is really big because any Linux distro can then support the Java platform ‘out of the box’. Cool!

I own both Sun and IBM stock, but I must say that I find IBM’s management decisions in the last few years to be more to my liking than Sun’s!