Re: [myoss] Re: [ossig] Don't stifle innovation

[Dinesh Nair <dinesh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/22/05 12:06 Colin Charles said the following:
> They don't hold BSD, Mozialla, or Artistic Licensed based stuff that
> they could register a software patent for
> 
> Right before the snippet:
> "Our Promise with Respect to Software Patents We Hold
> Definitions:"

which doesnt change it. i could, theoretically, violate a RH patent by 
writing BSD code. the waiver they give is not applicable to me. patents are 
license agnostic, and the instantiation of the code (which is GPL as RH 
develops it) is irrelevant. (separate patents from the copyrights/licenses 
they hold on the code they've written)

if RH were to truly be taken as the noble folk they seem to be, they need 
to extend this to /all/ open source software, irrespective of license. 
adhering to the list produced by OSI is a good start.

> http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/ looks more to your liking
> I guess

"Novell has previously used its ownership of UNIX copyrights and patents to 
protect customers against similar threats to open source software made by 
others." - at least that sounds license agnostic.

> What is Microsoft's policy when it comes to BSD?

none, but then they're not holding themselves out as open source patent 
friendly either. RH gives the impression that they've released their 
patents to open source when in reality it's only a small (<10%) subset of 
open source licenses they've allowed their patents to be used in.

-- 
Regards,                           /\_/\   "All dogs go to heaven."
dinesh@alphaque.com                (0 0)    http://www.alphaque.com/
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