Others have covered it pretty well already but it i not about patenting "the code" (which is not possible) but being able to adhere to the GPL's enforced perpetual non-exclusive rights to redistribute. If you took out a patent license you could not guarantee those freedoms to your customer which would violate the GPL
On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Anon Y Mous <system5unix at yahoo.com> wrote: > > It becomes more complex than that, if Sun were to take a patent license > on such GPL'd (VLC) > > code and then sell the product the next person would not be able to pass > along those GPL > > "freedoms" which would be in violation of the GPL.... > > You are reading way too much into what I'm saying. I never said Sun should > patent any open source projects. I just said they should add branding, > support and codecs to a media player and sell it to Solaris users (such as > myself) to make a little quick cash. > > It is 100% perfectly legal to SELL people products that are based on GPL'ed > code. Red Hat Linux bases their entire business model on selling people > binary distributions of GPL'ed code and if Red Hat can sell people a branded > version of Linux called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" that is really not all > that much different from CentOS other than it has pictures of little red > hats on it, then Sun could sell people a branded version of an open source > media player if they wanted to. Sun has already released a branded version > of GNOME called "Java Desktop System", so why not a branded version of VLC > called "Java Media Player". Makes perfect sense to me. > > Richard Stallman said himself that there is nothing wrong with selling > someone a binary product distribution made out of bundled up GPL'ed code. > The only restriction with the GPL is that Sun would have to give the source > code any changes they made to the GPL project back to the community, and in > my experience Sun should have no problem with doing this as they are > historically one of the #1 contributors of open source code (in terms of > sheer quantity of code shared with the community). If you look at how much > code Sun has shared, they are up there with other top contributors such as > the Regents of UC Berkeley and GNU / FSF. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20090713/3c20220d/attachment.html>
