If Red Hat is able to leave the licensing issues for their
Linux patents unresolved and they still manage to be regarded as being
in good standing with most contributors and would-be customers, then,
in the coming months, many other Linux companies will take this is a
green light to file for many patents and remain silent when asked to
explictly grant permission to the public to practice the patents in
free software. There is little or no business reason to publicly
grant such permission if one can get away with not doing so.
Although other companies today already have many patents that
they could argue are infringed by certain free software components.
The Linux patents are different as a practical matter, however, in
that the chance of prevailing in that argument will be greater when
if alleged infringer is using the code for which the patent was
originally submitted.
Eventually, as some companies are bought or go out of
business, it is a statistical certainty that some of these patents
will pass into the control of parties that do not care about the GPL's
penalties for enforcing a software patent (after all, that would allow
litigation only against copiers of the software, and a copyright owner
would have to sue, which is approximately already the level of danger
one has with an unlicensed software patent).
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road
adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035
+1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
"Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 31 2002 - 22:00:21 EST