Ah, thanks for the clarifications! And yes, I agree, those are fair points.
Cheers, Ben On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 2:38 PM, Tzeng, Nigel H. <nigel.tz...@jhuapl.edu> wrote: > > > On 2/19/18, 8:38 AM, "License-discuss on behalf of Ben Hilburn" < > license-discuss-boun...@lists.opensource.org on behalf of > bhilb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Not sure I'm following your argument, here? If a party has been contracted > by the government to write code, as part of contract negotiations the > government can require that the code be delivered as FOSS. Especially with > the recent changes in the NDAA, the government is clearly trying to push > acquisition officers to be more knowledgeable about these things. > > My point was that there may be no contractor code at all and therefore > there is no code under any sort of FOSS license, just public domain. > Depending on the existence of contractor developed code under a FOSS > license to make the entire code base FOSS doesn’t work in this case. > > > > The DDS policies posted online don't discuss patents much, aside from a > bit in the license selection portion, "Our suggestions for permissive > licenses are *MIT*, * ISC*, or *BSD-3* unless patents are potentially > involved in which case we suggest Apache 2.0 although the others work too." > I have no idea how intra-government but inter-org patent licensing works, > though, so I don't have anything to add to this piece of the discussion. > It's worth noting, though, that the broader open-source community has long > dealt with the same question, "what if someone unknowingly implements a > patent and publishes it under the Apache license," problem that you raise > here; I don't think it's unique. > > > > The use of Apache 2.0 is problematic because it IS a fairly unique > problem. The issue is the USG as a single entity implies that a patent > grant under Apache 2.0 provided by the ARL gives that patent away even if > it was not created by the ARL but some other part of the federal government. > > > > Your scenario is different where the developers implements a patent > someone else owns. They don’t own the patent so the patent grant under > Apache is meaningless. > > > > The only place that the broader open-source community has dealt with this > issue is in the educational world which is why we have ECL v2. Which is > Apache with a patent grant only for those patents owned by the authors of > the code. > > _______________________________________________ > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@lists.opensource.org > http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license- > discuss_lists.opensource.org > >
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