On Mon, 2018-08-06 at 20:44 -0600, Tycho Andersen wrote: > Hi all, > > Dinesh Subhraveti has claimed that some part of this series might be > patented. While he has not furnished me with anything to confirm this > claim, I'll put this series on hold. Just on a general policy for handling things like this. Firstly, never discuss specifics on a mailing list. Patents are a really tricky area where advice in confidence is needed and lack of confidentiality usually only benefits the patent holder. Secondly, vague threats (like this) can be safely ignored. Thanks to the terms of the GPL and the specific actions of OIN, we legitimately have licences to a vast pool of patents, so we should assume for every vague threat of the existence of a patent that we do legitimately possess a licence until the threat is made specific. Finally, if the vague threat becomes specific (which means citation of patent by number and claim) you need to engage the resources we have at our disposal to investigate. Likely it will be OIN resources that do this investigation, but the way to begin is to start with your corporate counsel for contributions on behalf of a company. If they're on behalf of you as an individual, you can begin with Counsel which the Linux Foundation will provide. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
