Re: GPL'ed Patent Pool

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 18:39 -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Monday 13 September 2004 17:36, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 15:40 -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > >    RedHat sort-of tried to do this, but its so weak and
> > >    half-hearted that its all but useless.
> > >    http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html
> >
> > Certainly is not intended to be weak or half-hearted, doesn't look that
> > way to me. But I am not a lawyer.
> >
> > Havoc
> 
> I wouldn't describe it quite the same way Linas does, but:

I'm not a lawyer or able to speak for Red Hat, so won't try to argue
point-by-point, but in summary:

 - I agree with you that the Red Hat policy isn't a "patent pool"
   offering defense to others
 - However I think it does clearly allow any open source software
   (defined as a list of common licenses, to avoid ambiguity) to use any
   Red Hat patents - that's the whole point
 - I think the effect is that Red Hat patents are "GPL-like"
   (only available to open source community, not to proprietary)

Most Red Hat developers are fairly proud of this patent policy. I don't
know of another company that offers anything similar.

Havoc