Scripsit [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian T. Sniffen) > And, as it happens, companies do grant free patent licenses: it's > common practice when working on a standard which must be approved by a > standards body with a RF policy: typically, the patent is licensed for > any use which implements that standard.
A patent license that applies only to implementations of a specific standard is not free (as in free speech). > This is an interesting restriction on modification-and-use: you can > modify the program to use the patented technology outside the scope of > the standard, but you can't compile and use that code without > infringing on the patent. I *think* the result can be Free Software, I think it is clear that it is not. > But for the case of Apache, for example, it's enough for every > contributing company to grant a universal license to their patented > technology for use in web browsers, and for the ASF to refuse > contributions to the mainline Apache from anyone who doesn't agree. If ASF makes public an intention to include in upstream Apache patented code that cannot be used in X servers, desktop calculators or Forth compilers, then we can never be sure that the next minor upstream release will still be free software. Of course the Debian maintainer for apache *may* choose to audit each new upstream release to see if non-free patents have crept in, but I would advise moving it to non-free right away to avoid future trouble. -- Henning Makholm "... and that Greek, Thucydides"
