Yes in general, that is true...I know Sun holds patents over concepts implemented in GPL code where this is not an issue. In this case it is the fact that MPEG LA, MS et al arent so friendly to FOSS
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Brian Cameron <Brian.Cameron at sun.com>wrote: > > 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 >> > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20090713/96866237/attachment.html>
