Sun stops short of full patent pledge

Sun Microsystems has reiterated its commitment to be a good boy in the open source community, but the company still refuses to put its pledge in writing.

"Clearly we have no intention of suing open-source developers," Solaris marketing manager Tom Goguen told Cnet However, he added, "We haven't put together a fancy pledge on our Web site" to that effect.

The server company is facing harsh criticism from the open source community over the way it opened the Solaris source code and how it's applying it protective patent umbrella to areas outside of the Solaris operating system.

In summary, when Sun opened up the source code under the CDDL licence, it promised to help anybody abiding by that licence. But anyone who doesn't subject themselves to it, potentially run the risk of getting sued by the server giant over patent infringements, including developers working on Linux.

Last year, as details emerged of the legal settlement between Sun Microsystems and its long time foe Microsoft, it turned out that Sun pulled a similar trick on OpenOffice and its developers.