Re: business models [was patent stuff]

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 09:57, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 May 2002 09:53, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote:
> > And BTW I'm OK with patents as long as their licensed for free to GPLed
> > software (maybe add a clause that makes this irreversable?).
> 
> Indeed, an irreversible license is essential, but that's not all.  Not
> only must the GPL be accommodated, but all open source licenses.  And it
> is not enough to be free as in "without cost": it must also be free of
> additional restrictions.

I don't think you can realistically expect all open source licenses like
the BSD one to be accomodated. Otherwise people would ship binary apps
linked with a BSD licensed libpatent.o/c that was useless to anyone. The
GPL restrictions happen to work very nicely in terms of making a patent
available for free software (or one definition thereof), the BSD license
alas doesn't.