Often when people ask the question "Can I legally do that?", they mean "Will someone sue me if I do...?". Sadly the answer is that if something is successful, no matter what and how you did things, at some point someone will just try and sue, just to see if they can get some part of the success/money.

This talk will describe some of the copyright, trademark and patent issues a Free Software hacker dealing with the core java platform may encounter. And some techniques we as a community can employ to make the chances of individual hackers being the target of a lawsuit smaller and how to make it harder for someone to take down one of our core java platform projects.