[consulting] Patenting Drupal solutions

[William Smith]

Well, to be fair, the question was "Is anything *we* are doing
patentable?".  What they are doing is as of yet undefined.

I'm opposed to software patents, generally, and have walked away from
projects where a contingency was the attempt to patent what I had been
working on, but what I had been working on in those cases *was* often rather
novel and unique.  Having Drupal as a platform, upon which you build novel
solutions is similar to having PHP as a platform, upon which you build the
CMS.  Depending on what you are doing, there are probably multiple routes
that you could go, and multiple ways that license compliance could be
interpreted.  As others have said, advice on this list is no substitute for
proper legal counsel.

The OP did not specify what sort of work was being done.  Presumably,
because it is on this list, Drupal was in the mix there somewhere, but that
doesn't necessarily mean much, AFAIK.  But then, IANAL, and have little
interest in imagining what direction a patent lawyer might want to take such
things.

Best,
William

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Adam Mordecai <mordecai at advomatic.com>wrote:

> The idea of patenting OPEN SOURCE software is sort of like worshipping
> The Devil in a Catholic Church full of parishioners in the middle of a
> service. The outcomes would be similar.
>
> If they want a closed source solution, then they should build their
> own rather than trying to copyright the blood sweat and tears of
> thousands of developers all over the world and claiming it as their own.
>
> When you see your client, please laugh in their face and pat them on
> the head as if they are a cute baby goat in a petting zoo.
>
> Adam Mordecai
> Advomatic Partner
> ---------
> AIM: AdamMordecai
> Main: (303) 733-0215
> Cell: (646) 625-9010
> Fax: (646) 472-7993
> ----------
> Advomatic
> 243 5th Ave, Suite 460
> New York, NY 10016
> http://www.advomatic.com
>
> On Dec 12, 2008, at 11:42 AM, Brett Evanson wrote:
>
> I'm working with a client that has asked me this question: "Is
> anything we are doing patentable?".
>
> What sort of things are patentable within open source development?
> What sort of issues are there with specific licenses? Where do I even
> go to start here?
>
> Any help is much appreciated.
>
> --
> Brett Evanson
> brettev at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> consulting mailing list
> consulting at drupal.org
> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
>
> _______________________________________________
> consulting mailing list
> consulting at drupal.org
> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/attachments/20081212/8b066038/attachment.htm