On Sun Apr 29 8:23 , Tim Churches <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sent:
>techniques is just a formal way of saying "Go ahead, I won't take you to >court if you use DOCLE." Your refusal to grant such a license for the >patents which you hold over DOCLE can only be construed as meaning that >you do wish to maintain the ability to take legal action against those >who use DOCLE technologies without a license from you to do so. Seeing as Kuang already has a paying customer in the form of HCN, there isn't a big drawcard for him. In other industries, one would argue that you need to open up DOCLE if it is to form the basis of a communication standard, as otherwise a single vendor has veto power over the whole market. However, in the HealthLink model this is already the case, and the medical IT market seems fairly happy with this. What is Tom Bowden's incentive to cut cheques for Kuang to buy DOCLE, well, the market signals its demand for the higher-level decision-support that it offers But wait: we've already established Tom as the Microsoft-style single-vendor standards-setter, to avoid setting any standard ourselves, therefore there is no way for us as customers to 'signal' anything, because we already must buy HealthLink to communicate with anyone. I'd propose a `halfway-house' model: Kuang can release DOCLE under the GPL with a patent grant for use under the GPL licence only. This allows it to be studied, and provides the guarantee of continuity of the codebase in the unstable commerical world, but this code can't be included in HealthLink/MD3/etc.: they need to negoitate directly with Kuang and cut cheques as before. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
