Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> If it was possible to set up things in such a way that it was easy for a
> company to declare "no first use" on a patent in the space of standards
> implementation, and very disruptive for a company to renege on such a
> promise (for instance, by having all the "no first use" promises by other
> companies being rendered inoperative), we might get something..... but this
> is just me thinking aloud. I have not been able to get any patent lawyers
> interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.
In fact, Larry's "go on the offense" proposal appears to be derived from a
patent-termination-clause concept I invented four years ago, which he later
wrote into the 1.0 versions of AFL and OSL.
It didn't work. None of the legal departments at IBM or the other
Fortune-100 corporations with the biggest stake in open source were
willing to go first in sacrificing the "advantage" of being able to
play multi-billion dollar games of chicken with their portfolios.
So I *have* been able to get patent lawyers interested in
pursuing/spearheading this train of thought. And it dead-ended.
Thus, in part, my belief that IETF and W3C and other standards
organizations must lead on this issue or become irrelevant.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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