From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Rob Landley Subject: Re: Fwd: Some embedded topics Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 19:09:16 -0500 Message-ID: <200806011909.17326.rob@landley.net> References: <483C83DE.3040604@cisco.com> <483D7355.5050803@coritel.it> <48407DE5.3000208@am.sony.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <48407DE5.3000208@am.sony.com> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-embedded-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Tim Bird Cc: Marco Stornelli , Joe MacDonald , linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org 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.