Margaret Wasserman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I am afraid that your choice below won't mesh very well with why
> companies have software patents in the first place.
You're right, it doesn't. Unfortunately, we really cannot live with
anything less than I have described. My personal wish that this
reality were different is as fruitless as yours.
> However, in doing this, MMI wants to ensure two things:
>
> (1) That they continue to protect their patent rights regarding the
> use of this technique for other purposes (such as cheese graters and
> IP phones). So, they want to limit the royalty-free terms to
> implementation of the IETF's WRAPCTL protocol and/or to use on
> Wireless Access Points. (I think that this would run amok of your
> proscription against "restricting the area of application", right?)
Right.
Area-of-application rules mean that code reuse can be fraught with
dangerous legal problems because of someone's well-meaning judgment
call about what's in-area and what is out-of-area. Such legal
exposure is death to us -- our project groups can't afford lawyers to
fight those battles -- so our licensing requirements have to foreclose
that entire category of causes of action. Otherwise our development
and distribution methods, which depend on code reuse and redistribution
being safe and friction-free, would seize up and croak.
Myself, I'll cheerfully recognize that MMI's interest is legitimate in
some sense -- I wish I knew of a way to solve this problem that doesn't
have deadly poison side-effects, and have devoted a lot of think time
to trying to invent one. No joy.
> (2) That they maintain and enhance the defensive value of their
> patent, by making it clear that the royalty-free terms do not apply
> to anyone who sues them for violation of a different patent. (If I
> understand correctly, the OSS community doesn't have a problem with
> this concept, as long as no paperwork is required?).
That's correct.
> Are there any IPR terms that MMI could offer that would meet these
> goals while also allowing the WRAPCTL protocol to be implemented in
> OSS implementations? If we could find that middle ground, I think it
> would be very valuable to the IETF and to the OSS community.
I don't believe any such middle ground exists. I and others have tried
to imagine it into existence and failed. We regret this, but it seems
to be reality.
> The sad truth, of course, is that (in the example above) it is far
> more likely that MMI would not determine that the WRAPCTL protocol
> violated their patents until longer after it had been standardized by
> the IETF and implemented in many commercial and OSS implementations.
> So, what would be do then?
Suffer a lot.
What your scenario demonstrates is that there is a fundamental and
nigh-unbridgeable conflict between open-source development and the
patent system. The open-source community is already well aware of
this, thank you. We don't know what to do about it either.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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