Re: Problem for commercial products.

Posted Aug 28, 2002 16:02 UTC (Wed) by ion++ (guest, #2433) [Link]

> From the perspective of proprietary software this could be a problem. At
> this point you should hope that you are one of those companies that has
> an arsenal of patents to negotiate with. From the free software
> perspective this is not an issue. 110% of nothing is still nothing.

What about RedHat. What about SuSE ?? They sell their distribution. Does
that count as sellings software ?? Okay, so Apache might not need to pay,
but RedHat and SuSE does.

> None the less, the point that you bring up is valid and should be used
> to show congress the dangers that software patents pose to emerging
> technologies, companies, and innovation in general!

Well sort of. I think software patents will hurt the industry, and
especialy Free software. (Free as in speech). Rand licensing is
unacceptable to Free software, no matter if you base it on a one time
fee, a pr. unit fee, or a pr. sold fee.

JonB