• thantik@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I guess you don’t remember when Google forked java in Android and still got railed in the courts by Oracle, who simply bought SUN Microsystems in order to gain the rights to do so. It’s not as simple as “oh we’ll just fork it!” when it comes to patents, intellectual property, etc.

    • waitmarks@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      What are you even talking about? systemd is currently under an opensource license, they cant retroactively change that. Any changes would be for it going forward if it is even possible for them to buy the rights to it (which I’m not convinced it is as Lennart Poettering is not the sole contributor and Red Hat / IBM and many others also have a significant stake in it). Sun patented Java on it upon its creation and when oracle bought sun, they bought the rights to those patents. They aren’t comparable situations. Java was never open source, it was source available, but still proprietary.