Che: > 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
Simply having a patent, by itself, is not a problem for free software. It only creates a distribution issue if the patent owner places restrictions on the code, such as needing to pay a licensing fee to use it. There are many patents that have no GPL incompatible restrictions placed upon users by the patent owner. Brian > On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Anon Y Mous <system5unix at yahoo.com > <mailto: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 <http://opensolaris.org> > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org <mailto:desktop-discuss at > opensolaris.org> > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
