You can also read the previous email from Elaine Lee, along with my reply to it (once I find a saved copy of it).
Once you have read the letter that's reproduced below, please also read the notes I've written at the end of this page.
Our ref: 610386-v01\AJF 12 June 2003 Craig Dewick 9 McKell Avenue WATERFALL NSW 2233 By email cdewick@lios.apana.org.au Dear Mr Dewick Sun Intellectual Property We act for Sun Microsystems, Inc ("Sun") and refer to your 25 February 2003 email to Elaine Lee. We are instructed that you operate the following websites which relate to Sun's products: (a) www.sunrk.com.au; (b) www.sun-surplus.com; (c) lios.apana.org.au; (d) www.sunsurplusgroup.com; (e) www.sunshack.org; (f) www.sunshack.net; (g) www.sunshack.info; (h) www.one4sun.org; collectively, "the Websites". It is our understanding that you are currently publishing Sun documentation including Sun's System Handbook, Sun's Field Engineer Handbook and Sun's Field Information Notices ("Documentation") on the Websites without Sun's consent. The Documentation and Sun's corporate logos are literary and artistic works which are protected by copyright. Portions of the information contained in the Documentation are also confidential to Sun and should not be disclosed without its consent. By copying the Documentation and communicating them to the public, you have infringed and are continuing to infringe Sun's copyright. Sun is also concerned that you are: (i) disclosing confidential information and/or trade secretes contained in the Documentation in breach of confidentiality obligations; and (ii) using the Documentation and Sun's corporate logos in such a manner that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive visitors to the Websites in breach of section 52 of the Trade Practises Act 1974 (Cth). Sun has incurred loss and damage as a result of your copying of the Logo and Documentation and publishing them on the Websites. Sun has unsuccessfully sought to resolve it's concerns with you amicably. While we appreciate from our review of your earlier correspondence with Sun that you appear to be an enthusiatic supporter of Sun's product who claims to have no intention of defrauding Sun or misleading its customers, you should be aware that: (a) as owner of copyright in the material it is up to Sun - and not you - to determine when, where and how its Documentation is reproduced; and (b) you can nevertheless infringe Sun's rights even if you had no intention of doing so. Accordingly, we are instructed that unless you: (A) either return to Sun all Documentation and other materials published by Sun which appear on the Websites or destroy all such Documentation and materials and certify their destruction in writing; and (B) undertake in writing not to publish any materials referred to in (A) on any website or otherwise without Sun's prior written consent; by 4pm on Thursday 26 June 2003, Sun my commence proceedings against you, without further notice, to enforce its rights. Yours faithfully BAKER & MCKENZIE [ a signature ] Anthony Foley (02)9225-0289 Email: anthony.foley@bakernet.com
Since it has taken since September 2002 to reach this point, and Sun has still not done anything except hide behind their corporate smokescreen, I feel this is quite belated on Sun's part since they are not prepared to come out and publicly admit that they do not want to support ALL users of their products - regardless of whether these users have a service contract or not, and regardless of whether they are using the latest bleeding-edge hardware, or something older which is still perfectly suited to the task for which it is being employed.
If it wasn't for the efforts of myself, and other people in the IT community such as Bill Bradford who operates www.SunHelp.org, Sun Microsystems would gradually become a very stale business with no possibility of maintaining a strong position in the IT market unless they decide to support (and hopefully also acknowledge) all the free [to Sun] grass-roots promotion of their company and their products which shows people that Sun's hardware is, for the most part, superbly designed and built and with just a little care and feeding will continue to be useful for many years after it has been manufactured (and not just during the time it's covered under a service contract).
If this grass-roots support and promotion wasn't in existence, there would be much less likelihood of other after-market aspects of IT such as alternative operating systems for Sun machines achieving the successful followings that they currently enjoy.
We don't see Sun trying to prosecute authors of alternative open-source operating systems for Sun hardware such as NetBSD, OpenBSD, or one of the various flavours of non-commercial Linux (such as Debian or Gentoo), because their free source code might expose information about Sun's supposed hardware secrets, do we? ... Food for thought.
[ Note: Redhat Linux does not count here since it's a commercial product. ]
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