Just read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry defending the settlement of the Kodad lawsuit. It was sad reading. I guess it would be impossible for him to say that the settlement was the stupidest thing Sun have ever done, McNeally would probably have fired his ass for it. But no matter what angle Jonathan tries to put on it Sun showed less backbone and insight in this case than Microsoft has done with Eolas or IBM have with SCO. And if he thinks people in Java community will praise him for giving in to Kodak I think he is wrong. What Jonathan fails to see is that giving in to Kodak (or anyone else) is wrong cause it leads to the same problems as giving in to terrorists and blackmailers; it will spur more such actions. Maybe Sun have got Kodak of the back of Java developers for the time being (of course if I where Kodak I would really start looking around for other patents to bring up knowing that Sun is ready to cough up huge amounts of money no matter what), but they have also made sure that thousands of other people with dubious patents have seen and learned that taking Sun to court over them will get Sun to hand over huge amounts of money even if they, as Schwartz himself admit, think the claims and patents are bogus. And the natural extension of that is of course that if a deep pocketed giant to Sun are prepared to pay great amounts of money to settle groundless claims then surely smaller players (like the companies and people in the Java development community) would be even easier pray wouldn ‘t they?

So Jonathan you haven’t saved anyone, you just brought hell one step closer to our door. Thanks…..