Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 05:04:09PM -0600, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> Has anyone tried to talk to Apple to allow us to use their patent for
> this on our desktop? It seems to me that we pose no real business threat
> to them, and if anything they would prefer that we "validate" their
> patent by licensing it, and thus giving precedent, than fighting it with
> prior art. They certainly know we are not going to *pay* for a license.

  You basically cannot Licence a patent for free software project,
it's not only an ethic issue, licencing the patent means defining
a framework for which using that patent is granted, and unless that
patent licence has no restriction (basically releasing it) that mean
people outside of that framework cannot reuse the code freely. This
is a problem.
  In practice, it's relatively common to see patent licence being
granted freely to implement a given technology (for example for the
purpose of implementing a protocol or some specification done at the
IETF or W3C), in that case the framework is not defined in term of 
who can use it but for what purposes, but that is still a very serious
problem. For example I remember a big company granting one of its
patent for the implementation of an XML based specification, but what
happen if that same code is used with an HTML input ? 
  The only safe thing to do for a free software project is to consider
the scope of the patents it is aware of and carefully work around 
that mine field.

Daniel

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