IBM has recently released 500 patents for use in opensource code. http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf "...In order to foster innovation and avoid the possibility that a party will take advantage of this pledge and then assert patents or other intellectual property rights of its own against Open Source Software, thereby limiting the freedom of IBM or any other Open Source developer to create innovative software programs, the commitment not to assert any of these 500 U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Open Source Software." Since this includes patents on compression and encryption stuff, we will definitely be faced with deciding on whether to allow use of these patents in the main Python library. Somebody was worried about BSD-style licenses on Groklaw, and said, "Yes, you can use this patent in the free version... but if you close the code, you're violating IBM's Patents, and they WILL come after you. Think of what would have happened if IBM had held a patent that was used in the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack? Microsoft used it as the base of the Windows NT TCP/IP stack. IBM could then sue Microsoft for patent violations." To which he got the following reply: "Sorry, but that's not correct. That specific question was asked on the IBM con-call about this announcement. i.e. if there were a commercial product that was a derived work of an open source project that used these royalty-free patents, what would happen? "IBM answered that, so long as the commercial derived work followed the terms of the open source license agreement, there was no problem. (So IBM is fine with a commercial product based on an open source BSD project making use of these patents.)" This means to me we can put these in Python's library, but it is definitely something to start deciding now. -- Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org
Scott> Since this includes patents on compression and encryption stuff, Scott> we will definitely be faced with deciding on whether to allow use Scott> of these patents in the main Python library. Who is going to decide if a particular library would be affected by one or more of the 500 patents IBM released? Skip
Skip Montanaro wrote:
Who is going to decide if a particular library would be affected by one or more of the 500 patents IBM released?
Skip
I am thinking more along the lines of, "our policy on accepting new code [will/will not] be to allow new submissions which use some of that patented code." I believe our current policy is that the author warrants that the code is his/her own work and not encumbered by any patent. -- Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org
"Scott David Daniels"
IBM has recently released 500 patents for use in opensource code.
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf
"...In order to foster innovation and avoid the possibility that a party will take advantage of this pledge and then assert patents or other intellectual property rights of its own against Open Source Software, thereby limiting the freedom of IBM or any other Open Source developer to create innovative software programs, the commitment not to assert any of these 500 U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Open Source Software."
The exception is, of course, aimed for now at SCO and their ridiculous lawsuit against Linux and IBM with respect to Linux. from another post
I believe our current policy is that the author warrants that the code is his/her own work and not encumbered by any patent.
Without a qualifier such as 'To the best of my knowledge', the latter is an impossible warrant both practically, for an individual author without $1000s to spend on a patent search, and legally. Legally, there is no answer until the statute of limitations runs out or until there is an after-the-fact final answer provided by the court system. Terry J. Reedy
Terry Reedy wrote:
"Scott David Daniels"
I believe our current policy is that the author warrants that the code is his/her own work and not encumbered by any patent.
Without a qualifier such as 'To the best of my knowledge', the latter is an impossible warrant both practically, for an individual author without $1000s to spend on a patent search, and legally. Legally, there is no answer until the statute of limitations runs out or until there is an after-the-fact final answer provided by the court system.
Absolutely. I should have written that in the first place. I was trying to generate a little discussion about a particular case (the released IBM patents) where we might want to say, "for these patents, feel free to include code based on them." My understanding is that we will remove patented code if we get notice that it _is_ patented, and that we strive to not put any patented code into the source. --Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org
participants (3)
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Scott David Daniels
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Skip Montanaro
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Terry Reedy