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

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 18:09 +0800, Dinesh Nair wrote:
> 
> 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)

Thank you for pointing that out. This has been sent to the legal queue

> 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.

But I can also see why they'd be afraid of the BSD license (or even the
LGPL). Fork codebase, add enhancements, and never return it back. Scary
stuff, just look at all the OpenOffice.org deriavatives out there

No excuse though (and I'm not a lawyer, so as per above, sent to queue)
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi


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