Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: business models [was patent stuff] | From | Alan Cox <> | Date | 29 May 2002 14:15:26 +0100 |
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On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 04:21, Adam J. Richter wrote: > Example definitions might be: "public domain or any license > certified by the Open Software Initiative", "a license that has
The OSI approves things like the BSD license which is a convenient open door for anyone to use such patents in proprietary code with a tiny useless BSD licensed library. That doesn't further free software, it doesn't provide opportunities for co-operative cross licensing to get GPL rights to other patents from the proprietary world and so forth. Being in a position where as part of the normal processes of proprietary software design we can get other companies to give free software access to some patents in return for access to use some our stuff proprietary is a win.
I would worry much more about the million odd patents IBM have, where IBM have no general statement of this nature than the Red Hat ones. Perhaps once the Red Hat statement is published IBM can be persuaded to show willing ?
> More importantly, licensing patents only for pure GPL'ed use > is unlikely to become a norm that you can expect broad adoption of > in free software businesses, as many of them tend to be proponents of > slightly different copying permissions. If we have a bunch of patents > licensed for GPL-only, another bunch for MPL-only, another bunch for > pure-BSD only, then the patent proliferation that I described > yesterday will still probably occur.
I would agree to an extent. Certainly purely GPL is excluding stuff which has identical 'all of package' rules like db3, Qt free editions, and much of KDE.
> free software under those licenses. If the GPL developers don't shield > the Apache developers, the X developers, the BSD developers, and the > MPL developers so that their ability to continue with the free software > portion of their activities has been respected, do you really think > they'll shield GPL development from their patents?
There is little evidence of that having happened with code, its also possible to extend lists of licenses, clarify them for specific product and so forth.
Alan
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