Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

If you could follow up to Apple and note that you don't represent GNOME
I think that would be good. :-(  If GNOME does anything along these
lines it should come from the board.

If we are going to ask companies for something, essentially what we need
is this (as far as I know):
 http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

However, your chances of getting this from anyone (*especially* Apple)
approach zero, and by even raising the subject you can create additional
problems. But if you do want to raise it you need to make it clear
you're speaking for yourself.

If you really want to address patents, what we need is to be patenting
everything we do under open-source-only terms. That would be a great
thing for some open source related foundation to undertake.

Havoc