On Apr 16, 2008, at 3:16 AM, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
On Apr 16, 2008, at 1:16 AM, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
GR has noted that he is working to get them to sign a CLA-C
among other things, this would really make the discussion moot.
No, I didn't say that. What I said was that I have no idea of what
Microsoft might or might not want to do with regard to a C-CLA.
What I did actually mention, though, was that the CLA-C wouldn't
resolve the issue, as any patent grant would be related to a
contribution. Since MS in itself isn't contributing any code per
se, the CLA-C patent grant would be moot (basically along the
lines of a security theatre).
Ciao,
I misunderstood then. My apologies.
I don't understand this argument. I understand what you're saying,
but it assumes that the top part excludes the patent part from
applying and is immutable.
What is the top and the patent part? My point comes straight from cla-
corporate.txt:
You hereby grant to the Foundation and to recipients of software
distributed by the Foundation a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive,
no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this
section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell,
import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies
only to those patent claims licensable by You that are necessarily
infringed by Your Contribution(s) alone or by combination of Your
Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) were
submitted.
The limitation is the key:
"where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by
You that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution(s) alone or
by combination of Your Contribution(s) with the Work to which such
Contribution(s) were submitted."
I believe that's clear enough: the patent license grant is limited to
all those patents that are inevitably infringed by a contribution of
the signer (or by combining the signer's work with others'). If there
is no contribution, I don't see what patent license grant would apply.
My turn not to understand: you keep talking about a unique situation
with a patent holder contributing via a third party. Why is that?
What's so specific? What would the difference be if it was any other
company sponsoring the work, given that we cleared the copyright bit?
Please answer to this question as it's relevant. You dodged it when
Jukka tried to understand your position, but I really believe it's
relevant at this point, and as much as you are strenuously defending
your right to a -1, I'm defending my right to challenge it and ask
you for a serious motivation.
On to the next question, that is whether you are trying to say that
OOXML cannot be implemented as Open Source because it would
necessarily break some patents. Just trying to understand, because
yes, I believe you crossed the FUD line a number of times already,
and I just can't understand how you can even only start to think that
a reverse engineered implementation under the assumption that most
likely there should be no patent is in a better position than an ECMA/
ISO standard with a serious PR campaign behind it, a somewhat unclear
in wording but pretty clear in spirit covenant (the OSP), a public
statement that MS wants to have an Apache Licensed version of POI and
no real evidence of patent threats apart from your maybes and a list
of potential patents most of which don't seem to apply (more to
follow on that).
Thanks,
--
Gianugo Rabellino
Sourcesense - making sense of Open Source: http://www.sourcesense.com
Blogging at http://boldlyopen.com/
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