> Sam wrote: > Before proceeding, I would like to seek advice from our counsel. I also want to proceed based > on specific patent infringement concerns and not on abstract hypotheticals. However, I don't > want to spend valuable time on this until we decide whether or not to accept this project for incubation.
Hi Sam, Thinking out loud here for a moment, it is possible that Sun had an agreement with Microsoft that allowed Sun to include technologies in StarOffice and OpenOffice.org that might draw an objection if shipped by anyone else. I don't know for sure however. More broadly though, it seems there are several different types of patent issues that could arise in a project: - If the project is not shipping binary code, it might not care about patent issues and instead allow the project builders or consumers to worry about this (along with a disclaimer of course that the project make no representations whether or not the code implements technologies that might infringe on patents in some jurisdictions and therefore all risk and responsibility is on the user). - A patent may only be valid in a certain countries, so users in some countries may not have a patent issue while users in other countries may. - Some consumers of a project may have a license to use a patented technology while others may not. - Some users may judge the legal and factual issues surrounding a patent differently, i.e., some may think there is no infringement while others may see a more significant threat. The net result of these issues are that project participants may have differing opinions on whether they want to either (a) include code for a possible patented technology or (b) include code to work around a potentially patented technology. Some may also want to see these issue addressed through compile or build options. There is also a question of how these issues should get documented or discussed, since any documentation or discussion "might be held against you in a court of law". Is there a general mechanism, method or approach for dealing with these issues within the Apache organization? Thanks, Allen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
