BrucePerens performing (the ending is drag's)! http://lwn.net/Articles/208186/
------ Posted Nov 8, 2006 0:55 UTC (Wed) by subscriber BrucePerens The form 8K is on Edgar. It gives a sentence or two about the patent agreement. It looks to me as if this is a "license by any other name". It's difficult to see why this would not be considered to be a violation of the GPL terms. If FSF were to use that to enjoin Novell from distributing the C library, Novell would be sunk. Bruce ------ ------ Posted Nov 8, 2006 3:53 UTC (Wed) by subscriber BrucePerens So, go looking for a patent in Microsoft's portfolio, at uspto.gov, that GNU LIBC might presently use but that we could do without. I'm sure you could find one. Thanks Bruce ------ ------ Posted Nov 8, 2006 5:58 UTC (Wed) by subscriber BrucePerens Dan Ravicher did one in which he found some 283 patents that potentially could read on Linux, two years ago. None of them had been litigated for validity. He can't show it to you, due to the triple-damages issue - if we know about specific infringed patents, we can be made to pay more in a lawsuit. This is a pernicious element in the law. I have not seen it either. Bruce ------ ------ Posted Nov 8, 2006 6:35 UTC (Wed) by subscriber BrucePerens > Nobody in their right mind would ever volenteer for a patent audit ... > it's just as likely to make you MORE liable. etc etc. 1. Someone already did it. He did not publish the list of patents, and thus protected the rest of us from increased liability. 2. I'm not asking you to find all potential infringements. You only need one. And if you want to be safe, choose one to which the Doctrine of Laches would apply. ------ ------ Posted Nov 8, 2006 6:55 UTC (Wed) by subscriber drag "Doctrine of Laches", eh? So basicly your saying that in order to screw over Novell, without screwing everybody else over, I'd have to find a patent violation that is invalid because the patent holder (Microsoft) let it slip for so long that a judge may end up throwing it out of court. What is going to stop Microsoft from just saying that the violating function in the code was non-obvious enough that it was hidden from them so that this is news to them and they are now well within their rights to persue licensing terms or get a cease and desist order? I think that if I were to publicly release knowledge of a patent violation and Microsoft acted on it immediately there would be no way to successfully pull a laches defense. As a defendant you would have to prove that Microsoft was negligent in persuing a claim. The burden is on the defense to prove laches... If Microsoft acted quickly after a claim became public how I would prove that they were secretly sitting on this in private? And if I could find a patent violation that at the same exact time was easily proven to be a invalid claim then how would this help prove that Novell was violating the GPL? The whole thing doesn't make any sense. ------ regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
