Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Mike Hearn wrote:

> In other words, one possibility is that a patch to add spring-loaded
> folders is written and switched off by default, but Novell/Red Hat/whoever
> license the patent so they can enable it in their "enterprise" versions. I
> have no clue how the GPL affects this.
>  
This isn't going to work, since Novell/Red Hat/whoever would need to 
impose additional restrictions on the version of Nautilus they 
distribute to customers (eg. the patent license might require that the 
customer not make multiple copies of the software).  If they do this, 
then they lose the right to distribute the software completely.

The situation is a bit different for freetype because you can use it 
under the BSD license which doesn't have such a clause.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/