On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 10:29 +1100, James Dumay wrote: > Novell are not handing the keys out to anyones castles, as GPL'd and > similarly licensed software will stay open and free
Yes, but as you point out, > You can be sued now and you could be sued before the deal if you > infringe on someones intellectual property Just because the copyright owner grants you licence to use something of theirs via GPL does not mean that you have right to use any patented technologies belonging to some third party that said software happens to use (willingly or not). As Brendan Scott pointed out in this week's OSWALD email, if the royalty payments indeed covered any (for instance) .Net technologies, then in effect Novell has acquiesced to the legitimacy of those patents. [ie, to be effective, a patent holder has to demonstrate that they are enforcing it. Gaining royalties from someone over it is such evidence]... ...which in turn makes explicit the fact that the rest of the world (ie, anyone not a Novell customer) has NOT been granted a right to use. Incidentally, this has ever been my concern with Mono in GNOME. Nothing against the language, or the project, or any apps written with it. But while _C#_ has been submitted for ECMA standardization, the _framework libraries_ (ie, ".Net", which Mono clones) appears to be heavily patented*, which would seem to put it in the same category as the GIF patent in terms of its free/non-free status, GPL or not. ++ Naturally all concerned will continue to muddy the waters - for example, I and many others are inferring what the "royalty payment" is for (danegeld, perhaps?) and much discussion is based on such speculation. Certainly we can't expect any clarity from the two companies in the subject line... after all, they're out of the line of fire. I rather expect that the entire topic is already far beyond the possibility for dispassionate debate, although SLUG's discussion of it has been quite measured. You should see TLUG in Toronto. Jeesh. AfC Sydney * I'm not an IP lawyer, of course. But I did some cursory searches on CAMBIA's Patent Lens a while back and oh my goodness there are a lot of patents covering .Net. That's fine (ie FOSS fine) if we're all given a worldwide royalty-free grant to use them. That has not been the case.
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