[copyleft-next] covered by patent grant

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Thu Aug 7 13:33:02 UTC 2014


On 08/07/2014 01:59 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 07/08/14 03:23, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> Part of http://faif.us/cast/2014/aug/05/0x4B/ with Fontana and VanL
>> concerned a desire for patent grant covering more than just
>> contributor's contributions/in combination with work, or whole work at
>> time of contributor's contributions (as I [mis]understand them, Apache2
>> and EPL do former, MPL2 and GPL3 latter).
> 
> MPL does the former - see section 2.3 c) in MPL 2 and 2.2 b) in MPL 1.1.

Thanks! I glazed over 2.3 c). By the way, I notice on
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPL_and_patents some confusion similar to mine.
I added to discussion there noting your correction.

>> I was kind of hoping that I'd discover recent copyleft-next commits
>> adding patent coverage beyond single work, but alas. Any in the
>> pipeline? What are the possible scopes of coverage beyond single work?
> 
> Coverage beyond a single work is presumably a patent pool?

That's what exists now (OIN was briefly mentioned in the podcast) in
addition to standards contribution requirements (not mentioned).

I could imagine a project rejecting contributions from non-members of
relevant patent pool (which for many projects might mean creating one)
instead of or as part of a CLA, but assume there's some benefit to
having free software license be the sole terms for all contributors and
users, thus encouraging speculation about how free software licenses
might be improved, which this forum seems to tolerate. :)

Mike


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