On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 17:20, Andrew Straw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Ondrej Certik wrote: > >> I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me it is not possible to patent a >> code that someone else has written and released as BSD or GPL, is it? > > IANAL either, but I don't think this is correct -- patents and > copyrights (licenses are implemented using copyright law) are > more-or-less orthogonal. Just because something is patented doesn't mean > it cannot be released under an open source license. You can have and > distribute the source code, but you might need to seek a patent license > to actually use the code. One example of this I know about is the > marching cubes algorithm in VTK (although that patent has now expired).
I believe the important part about Ondrej's hypothetical is that the code was written and published under an open source license *before* someone else tries to patent it. Under essentially all patent regimes, prior publication of the invention by someone else is grounds for preventing or invalidating a patent (with a lot of effort). The VTK situation is different; the VTK code was written after the algorithm was patented. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
