On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 1:36 PM Rick Moen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Quoting John Cowan ([email protected]): > > > The deep [patent] threat comes from third parties, which is a risk > > that neither ther the licensor nor the licensee can reasonably > > mitigate. > > [snip] > I _would_ join everyone in calling that open source -- and would > continue to do so in this scenario until two days after v. 2.1 emerges, > two years later, when MPEG-LA or Qualcomm suddenly says 'Please pay > exhorbitant royalties for our cherished if little known patent.' I > would now, if asked (and if credible people say the infringement claim > has teeth), say the example codec implementation is _not_ open source > (within reach of that patent), even though I asserted yesterday that it > was -- because now it is known to fail OSD#1, and yesterday it was > believed not to. > Open source only reflects permission from the licensor (or in some cases, the direct distributor) to exercise otherwise-exclusive IP rights. The whole "no warranties" part of open source licensing is precisely to deal with the unknowability of potential infringement claims. So, the codec is still open source, but there is still the newly-appreciated potential of infringement claims by a third party. It is possible that under certain licenses (e.g. GPLv2) that the distributor might need to stop distributing, or identify particular jurisdictions in which it can be distributed, but that doesn't change its open source status. Thanks, Van
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