On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 12:06:58AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: > >Given that our standard position on patents is to ignore them unless a > >particular patent holder is threatening us with lawsuits, I see no > >reason why we shouldn't apply the same policy here. > > Our standard position on patents is usually for the case where we have > no patent licence and don't know that we require one. This is a case > where we are being offered a non-free patent licence and a free > copyright licence.
To be fair, it's IBM's (obsolete[0]) boilerplate license and the patent clauses were "just in case"; most of the stuff under the IPL won't actually have applicable patents (that used to be policy, don't know if it still is). > Why aren't these two seperate licences? That's a fair question, it's usually less messy if written as two licenses. I think that's just braindamage. [0] They have since created and converted to the CPL, which is more generic but otherwise largely the same. People who are not IBM should not be using the IPL - it would either contain bogus references to IBM as the copyright holder, or it would have been edited and thusly would be a trademark violation to call it the "IBM Public License". Also the upgrade clause is insane if the original author isn't IBM. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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