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contact them?contact them?Posted Jun 25, 2008 16:45 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)In reply to: contact them? by corbet Parent article: A belated look at the Red Hat/Firestar patent settlement
While I agree in part with louie's opinion that the tone and bias of Jon's article seems to question Red Hat's behavior in this matter, I don't for a second disagree with our editor's stance that this patent is of questionable merit with which to cave to the patent holder's claim(s). First, this appears to be an unusually weak patent--certainly prior art exists from mid-1990s; second, the unanswered questions our editor mentions in the article might be misinterpreted as RH hiding something they don't want others in the open-source community to know1; and third, what legal, philosophical, and ethical basis does the community have with respect to deriving, using, and distributing the code for which RH alone paid money to permit? IMHO this seems like a weak example with which to demonstrate GPLv3-compliant patent licensing. I'm still trying to figure out why PJ is so ecstatic about this over at Groklaw. I'm hoping that in the coming weeks we find out more about what RH's license really means for itself and for the FLOSS community. 1 I've been known to entertain conspiracy theories, so take my second point above with a grain of salt. I honestly don't think RH would do something so injurious to its relationship with the FLOSS community.
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