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New company?New company?Posted Sep 11, 2009 13:15 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)In reply to: New company? by zotz Parent article: Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica) You don't grant a blanket license to "all Free Software." You send permission letters to one project at a time, and require the maintainer to put in a notice in the project man pages, README, and online docs. Each letter covers the entire patent portfolio, so a future maintainer won't say, "hey, that patent is expired, we can take that paragraph out of the docs now." If someone forked the project, he or she could take out the notice, since you can't put an additional term in the license to keep it there. This is different from OIN: OIN is companies that practice patents protecting themselves; this company would be an aggressive troll, looking for high yields, and just use Free Software licensing to clean up crappy patents and protect them from a common source of prior art research.
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New company? Posted Sep 11, 2009 14:24 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
*I guess we need two companies then.*
I like the idea of granting a blanket license to "all Free Software."
Perhaps it is OK to make it a condition to include the notice of the grant in the file.
If a notice is contemplated, a cleaner way to deal with the permissions other than on a patent by patent basis is likely needed.
drew
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