Alan Cox responds to Gilad Ben-Yossef about licensing of Linux-based patents:
>I don't think you can realistically expect all open source licenses like
>the BSD one to be accomodated. Otherwise people would ship binary apps
>linked with a BSD licensed libpatent.o/c that was useless to anyone. The
>GPL restrictions happen to work very nicely in terms of making a patent
>available for free software (or one definition thereof), the BSD license
>alas doesn't.
You could license all programs that consist entirely of
free software. That way, BSD, LGPL, and MPL software that did
not link in proprietary software would be allowed too, but your
example of a proprietary program that linked in the BSD'ed
libpatent.o/c would not be covered by this permission.
Licensing all programs that consist entirely of free
software would address issues like GPL'ed software that contains
content that is GPL compatible but not GPL'ed, future versions of
the GPL, what happens if a court ruling opens a loophole in the
GPL, and practicing the patent with free software in other free
operating systems.
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 - 22:00:22 EST