Did Sun do the right thing in settling with Kodak?
October 8, 2004Sun appears to have taken a page from Microsoft and learned that sometimes, money buys happiness. At least when it comes to lawsuits. Sun settled the Kodak lawsuit for about $90 million.
They claim of course that they did it to remove uncertainty about their key software product, Java. And a lot of other companies, including Microsoft, have already licensed the same patents from Kodak to avoid litigation.
Still, I think a lot of us wish Sun had stood up and fought the patents. These are too over-reaching, they could be interpreted as covering the very essence of modern programming–components that cooperate to build a larger system.
Nobody builds monolithic programs anymore. We all use components or objects to which we delegate certain functions. That’s what Kodak claims is covered in their patents. That seems ridiculous to me, it’s like patenting a for loop. It’s such a fundamental idea, a basic alphabet, that you can’t possibly patent it.
Oh well, once again the triumph of law over reason.
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