Licensing and patents are orthogonal.
They are pretty much unrelated. In terms of the license, you can do with
the code whatever you like.
If any of the algorithms were (are?) patented, independent of the
implementation, you would
have to pay a license fee to use it - no matter if you use a commercial
reference implementation,
the scikit-learn implementation or any other.
I'm not aware of any of the algorithms in scikit-learn being protected
by patents.
If you are aware of any, please let us know.
There is a trademark to Random Forests:
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/RandomForests/
I don't think this is enforced, but a trademark again is different from
licensing or patents.
If it was enforced, this would mean you can't use the *phrase* Random
Forest. The algorithm
itself is not protected afaik.
Also: IANAL, and this is also only related to US law. (US law has 4
kinds of intellectual property
protection to my understanding: copyright (licensing), patents,
trademarks and industrial designs.
Since there are no physical items at play here, luckily we "only" have
to deal with the first three.)
Andy
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