On Monday 10 August 2009, Nagarjuna G. wrote: > On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Nagarjuna G.<[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 9:16 PM, jtd<[email protected]> wrote: > >> And can anybody elaborate how standards are going to be open and > >> unencumbered and yet covered by patents? > > > > If a standard includes patented ideas, and the holder of the patent > > does not license it for royalty free usage, and does not state that > > free software could use it, then such a standard is not open. Though > > Sun had patents on some ideas related to ODF, they allowed royalty > > free usage and that free software could use it, making ODF an open > > standard.
In which case a statement to the effect that we do not support patent encumbered standards without explicit royalty free permissions to GPLV2/V3/BSD etc licenced software for use as per the terms of the licence should be good enough in FOSSCOM. So keeping the SW patent issue under the carpet (subject to all members not using their FOSSCOM membership to pursue a SW patents agenda) should be an acceptable start. > > Just to add: similarly if a software includes patented ideas and is > released under GPLv3, then the copyright holder is explicitly making > it unencumbered. -- Rgds JTD _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
