On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
I totally don't get the CLA-C argument.
It's a bit subtle, and it took me a little while to understand :)
Let us imagine that Acme Corp holds three patents, patent A, patent B and
patent C. Acme Corp has a ccla on file, as does its sole employee, Jim,
who also has an icla on file.
Jim starts contributing to Apache Foo on company time. He writes some
code in an area covered by patent A. All users of Apache Foo now have a
grant covering patent A. However, they don't have any rights on patents B
or C.
Now, you are also an Apache Foo contributor. You write commit some code,
which is in an area covered by patent B. However, as no Acme Corp
employees have worked on that bit of code, there is no grant covering
patent B, so we potentially have a problem. We still have a grant on
patent A, but nothing for patent C.
Jim now submits some patches to your contributions. Now, we do have work
from Acme Corp in the area covered by patent B. So, there's now a grant
covering patents A and B. However, there's still no grant on patent C.
Does that make sense? If we got a ccla from Microsoft tomorrow, it
wouldn't make any difference to POI, as Microsoft don't own the copyright
on any contributions to POI, so there will be no patent grants. In order
to get patent grants under the ccla, we'd need Microsoft to both file a
ccla, and have their employees work on POI. This is why many of us feel
that the Microsoft ccla issue is a red herring.
Do shout if that's still not clear enough, and I'll have another try at
explaining it all!
Nick
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