On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Gianugo Rabellino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
I fully agree with this part. Some companies (e.g. Google) periodically (like, pretty much every summer for the last three years) fund projects that meet their fancy. The ASF has participated and continues to participate in GSoC. I also fully agree with your attempt to tease apart concepts that Andrew has mixed together. And for your pursuing the answers to questions that Andrew has dodged. > 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). This is the only part that has even the faintest hope of concerning me. If it turns out that anybody instigates litigation against a licensee of ours solely on the basis of them making use of our Work, then we need to be prepared to act. Amongst the various options that we would need to consider -- at that time -- would be jettisoning the function in question. But I would caution everybody from putting too much weight on things like PR, and the existence of patents that may not be valid, enforceable, or only held for defensive reasons. - Sam Ruby - Sam Ruby --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
