Couple of legal questions

[Srinivas Dorairaj <sd...@us.ibm.com>]

POI Devs,

We have been successfully using Apache POI in our product for several 
years now and have been thankful for the wonderful work that the POI team 
does.  Recently our legal team raised a couple of concerns that we hope 
the developers on this list may be able to answer and help us continue to 
use POI:

1.  In the file BinaryTree.java ( 
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/poi/tags/REL_3_7/src/java/org/apache/poi/util/BinaryTree.java?revision=1022461&view=co 
), there are a 3 locations in the source where the comments say 'Based on 
Sun's TreeMap implementation, though it's barely recognizable anymore'. 
Our legal team has concerns that some of this code may have been derived 
from some version of Oracle/Sun Java original code.  Would someone in the 
POI team be able to confirm/deny/clarify this?

2.  In the LICENSE file, we found the information about the OOXML schemas 
and Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP).  There was a question 
raised whether the POI constitutes a 'Covered Implementation' under the 
terms of the MS OSP legal language below:

"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary 
Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, 
importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to 
a Covered Specification (“Covered Implementation”), subject to the 
following. "


Again, thanks for all the hard work and effort that has been put into this 
package.

Thanks
Srini