On 2007-04-11 10:08, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Brian E Carpenter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Simon,
Can you identify any instance of a non-profit GPL implementor or
distributor being sued for not having "sent a postcard" for the
style of RF license you are objecting to?
Brian, two responses:
1) You seem to assume that GPL implementers would violate the patent
license by redistributing their code without sending a postcard.
In order words, your question assumes and implies bad-faith amongst
GPL implementers.
Not specifically. My question is a practical one. People who receive
open source code, tweak it, and install it may often be completely
unaware that they should be asking for a license. Do we have any
practical evidence that IPR owners actually care?
What typically happens in practice, among good-faith practitioners,
is that there won't be any GPL (or Apache, or Mozilla, or ...)
implementation of the patented technology at all, because the
necessary rights cannot be acquired.
Doesn't that sound like a bug in the OSS licenses to you, assuming the
desired result is to make the Internet work better?
1) I don't believe this is a 'send a postcard' license. If you read
Mark's patent license, it starts with:
"Upon request, RedPhone Security will ...
I interpret this to mean that unless RedPhone responds to your
requests, you have not received any rights. Is this incorrect?
I'm assuming you will get a postcard in reply, certainly.
There are examples where companies won't respond to requests for these
type of RF patent licenses.
The phrase you quote doesn't allow for that.
A recent example that came to mind was
related to the BOCU patent by IBM:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.text.unicode.devel/23256
I won't respond here on that specific issue.
A different problem is if the patent is owned by a small company, and
the company goes away.
Normally the patent will fall into the hands of whoever strips
the assets. That's why a carefully constructed perpetual RF
license is needed, in any case.
Still, I'm not sure even a "send-a-postcard" patent license would be
compatible with free software licenses. Sending the postcard appear
to be an additional requirement, something that some free software
licenses explicitly forbid.
I think that is a bug in the OSS licenses. Whatever you or I may think
of patent law, it isn't going away, and the OSS licenses need to deal
with it realistically IMHO.
Brian
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