On Friday 30 May 2008 17:21:25 Tim Bird wrote: > Marco Stornelli wrote: > > There's a MontaVista patent on PRAMFS and I think that most of times > > when a company hears this thing it skips quickly this solution. > > Hmmm. I don't recall anything about a patent on PRAMFS. > > There are lots of issues here, but I think it's OK to use. > At a minimum, MontaVista's PRAMFS was submitted to the CE Linux Forum > in an older kernel (2.4.20-based). MontaVista was well-aware > of this submission (although it did not come directly from them). > MV was under an IP agreement with CELF which required them to > disclose such patents to the forum, and none was received. > > In any event (and without wanting to start a large off-topic legal > thread here), some lawyers would interpret the knowing publication > of an implementation embodying a patent under the GPL to be an > implicit license of use for the patent. Yup. Although IBM and Red Hat make this license explicit: you may use (at least some of) their patents in code licensed under the terms of GPLv2. I don't know if MontaVista has an explicit license statement or not. IBM licensed the RCU patents as a condition of the code getting merged into Linux, and Red Hat's patent policy is here: http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html More recently, they all joined the "open invention network" which is a mutually assured destruction patent pool thingy: http://www.ibm.com/news/us/en/2005/11/2005_11_10.html http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070807-google-signs-on-with-open-invention-network.html Beyond all that, there's a legal theory (as yet untested in court) that taking patent enforcement action against GPLv2 code is grounds for any copyright holder in the GPL project to terminate _your_ right to use that code, because it's a direction violation of GPLv2 clause 6 forbidding additional restrictions on recipients exercise of rights. (Fairly straightforward argument, really.) That hasn't been tested in court, and attempts to do so could easily drag on for quite a while. The end result could easily be "nobody can legally distribute the version that violates the patent, including the patentholder" since GPLv2 is designed to break closed. I neither know nor care about GPLv3. (As with vogon grandmothers, "In brief: avoid.") Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
