[consulting] Patenting Drupal solutions

[mark burdett]

Hi, I haven't studied patent law so I shouldn't get into this
discussion. But since you baited me with "WRONG" in all caps I'll
paste in something from the GPL 2.0 preamble and then you can go at it
("that's just the preamble," "this or that court struck this or that
down," etc. etc. etc.)

"Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software
patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at
all."

--mark

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:
>
> WRONG.
>
> GPLv3 has a patent protection clause.  GPLv2 does not.  The relevant text from section 11 of GPLv3 is:
>
> "Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."
>
> See the rest of section 11 for more information.  That section is NOT present in GPLv2.
>
> --Larry Garfield
>
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:22:33 -0800, "mark burdett" <mfburdett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> my one sentence summary is that basically GPL requires the patent
>> owner to license the patent for everyone to use freely.
>> But yes, they need a lawyer.
>>
>> --mark
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Brett Evanson <brettev at gmail.com> 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
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>>>
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