Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 23:24, James Henstridge wrote:
> 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.
> 

Precisely - this is also why it's so frustrating when people use the
(L)GPL for patented media codecs.

Havoc