[Ksummit-2011-discuss] Topic proposal: Procedures for dealing with potentially patent-encumbered code?

Trond Myklebust Trond.Myklebust at netapp.com
Fri Jul 1 10:58:09 PDT 2011


Hi,

Having recently had a brush with the topic of patent-encumbered code,
I've tried looking into what the procedures are for dealing with it. My
conclusion: we don't appear to ever have discussed this kind of topic as
a community.

The issue was as follows: we had developed code in the NFS community
that was potentially patent encumbered. When I approached the patent
holder, they were quite willing to give us a licence on what appeared to
be terms that appear to me (and to my lawyers) to be perfectly
compatible with the GPL. However, when I approached Linus, and asked
which legal opinions the community would trust, he didn't have an answer
apart from "try talking to Eben Moglen and the FSF".

If that is an authority that we all trust, then I'm fine with going to
the FSF, however before doing so it would be nice to know that

a) Is acceptance of a patent licence by the FSF a sufficient condition
to allow a maintainer to accept potentially patent-encumbered code?
and
b) Are there any other legal opinions that we respect sufficiently to
serve in lieu of the FSF?

Cheers
  Trond
-- 
Trond Myklebust
Linux NFS client maintainer

NetApp
Trond.Myklebust at netapp.com
www.netapp.com



More information about the Ksummit-2011-discuss mailing list