Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
Hello Alexei, On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 4:08 AM, Alexei Podtelezhnikov apodt...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Werner LEMBERG w...@gnu.org wrote: 3. Grant of Patent License. Do freetype authors hold or have they filed for a patent? Don't you need it first before granting any patent license? This is one strange and curious discussion thread without a patent at hand. There is a difference between patent and copyright. Patent means royalties, copyright does not. Patents mean a bit more than royalties, but let's not digress. The point of a patent clause in the software license is *to protect users and distributors* of the software, not authors. More specifically, an Apache 2.0 -style clause only protects from sub-marine patents being contributed to a project, and being asserted later. (for example, after the company who submitted the related contribution went through a change of ownership). That doesn't protect from random third-parties who never contributed anything from claiming infringement from patent they own, but *absolutely nothing* can protect against that, even if you release your code under the public domain. But at least, when you see such a patent clause in the license, you have a minimal guarantee that you won't get easily attacked in the future by the original authors, independently on the way you use the software (which may or may not align with their current or future personal/business goals). That's the main reason why so many major open source licenses have added them over time: Apache, GPL and MPL. Think about it, even the FSF thinks they're a good thing. That's why I think adding such a clause is a good thing for the project's users. There is no need to change a license. I do not think so. ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Werner LEMBERG w...@gnu.org wrote: 3. Grant of Patent License. Do freetype authors hold or have they filed for a patent? Don't you need it first before granting any patent license? This is one strange and curious discussion thread without a patent at hand. There is a difference between patent and copyright. Patent means royalties, copyright does not. There is no need to change a license. I do not think so. ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
On 01/18/2012 10:08 PM, Alexei Podtelezhnikov wrote: On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Werner LEMBERG w...@gnu.org wrote: 3. Grant of Patent License. Do freetype authors hold or have they filed for a patent? Don't you need it first before granting any patent license? This is one strange and curious discussion thread without a patent at hand. There is a difference between patent and copyright. Patent means royalties, copyright does not. There is no need to change a license. I do not think so. Offlist. Would have been interesting if, say, David, had patents, so then when Apple started shipping FreeType maybe we didn't have to fear their patents affecting FreeType so much... behdad ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
Do freetype authors hold or have they filed for a patent? AFAIK, no. Don't you need it first before granting any patent license? We want to cover contributed code. Let's assume that company XXX contributes code to have support for its new font driver format in FreeType, and we accept such code. If company YYY is using FreeType together with the code from XXX, XXX could ask for royalties from YYY, and this is what we want to avoid. Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
Are you willing to do the work to make sure no FreeType contributor currently has a patent on code they have contributed? This should be doable, given that there are just a handful of contributors who added longer, non-trivial stuff. Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType License and patents
On 01/13/2012 02:13 PM, Werner LEMBERG wrote: Comments? Are you willing to do the work to make sure no FreeType contributor currently has a patent on code they have contributed? Changing the license for upcoming contributions is a welcome addition to me, without the hassle of relicensing. behdad ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
