Simon Phipps wrote in relation to CC0:
... Had they persisted, I believe OSI would have needed to face the issue
of how licenses treat patents.
There really aren't too many alternative ways for FOSS licenses to treat
patents:
* The FOSS license does not contain a patent license.
* There is a patent license for the FOSS work as distributed.
* There is a patent license for the FOSS work as distributed and its
derivative works.
* There is a patent license for all FOSS works.
* The patent license is royalty-free and unencumbered for the
implementation of a standard.
I'm aware of FOSS-compatible licensing examples of each of these.
There are also sloppy licenses where at first read the scope of the patent
license isn't obvious. For example, the GPLv2 prohibits distribution if a
patent encumbrance is actually encountered – but without offering a patent
licenses directly.
There are many examples of patent-encumbered software where the copyright owner
doesn't own and can't license the patent. This is the problem of third party
patents and patent trolls and university professors and US government
employees.
I know of an example of FOSS software where the patent claims are licensed
separately (and for a fee) to almost the entire software industry already – but
separately from the FOSS copyright license. Certain important codecs are
licensed that way.
There are even examples where the copyright owner is willing to grant a patent
license for most FOSS applications but excludes certain applications. The
Oracle/Sun/Java TCK licensing is an example of that.
Given this wide assortment of alternatives, do you expect OSI to bless any one
in particular?
Probably the only grand solution to the patent problem is the one proposed by
Richard Stallman and lots of others: Prohibit software patents entirely. But
that ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes, so I hope OSI doesn't waste its time
traveling down that particular long and winding road.
/Larry
Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw Einschlag ( http://www.rosenlaw.com/ www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
Cell: 707-478-8932 Fax: 707-485-1243
From: Simon Phipps [mailto:si...@webmink.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 4, 2014 4:05 PM
To: license-discuss@opensource.org
Cc: Karl Fogel
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Can OSI take stance that U.S. public domain is
open source?
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 9:13 PM, John Cowan co...@mercury.ccil.org
mailto:co...@mercury.ccil.org wrote:
I continue to think that our CC0 decision was wrong insofar as it can
be read as saying that the CC0 license is not an open-source (as opposed
to OSI Certified) license. There may be reasons not to certify it,
but not to deny that it is open source.
We did not decide against CC0. The discussion was certainly at a low point when
Creative Commons withdrew it from the approval process, but that's what
happened, not an OSI denial. Had they persisted, I believe OSI would have
needed to face the issue of how licenses treat patents.
S.
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