James Henstridge wrote:
P'raps gnome should have it's own suite of IP? Particularly useful ideas could be patented and automatically licensed to any software using an approved open-source license. Proprietary-use could be negotiated either by a fee payment (to support legal fees for registration and defence of IP) or IP trade in such cases as this. All decisions to be made by gnome board...Havoc Pennington wrote:And possibly Red Hat for hosting the CVS tree containing the patch. (I wonder if there is any problem with the patch being available on the web from http://mail.gnome.org/ ?)No, I believe the source is still illegal, and GNOME Foundation or individual GNOME contributors would be liable for distributing it. e.g. Alex could be sued for committing the patch. I am not a lawyer, of course.James.
OK, I know this would never happen, political/legal complexities, etc... but in light of the increasing stupidity of patents in general one wonders how long before these kinds of IP issues completely swamp open source development.
Cheers, Darryl.