license with patent grants appropriate for specifications?
Bob Scheifler
Bob.Scheifler at Sun.COM
Tue Jan 11 23:46:15 UTC 2005
> The compromise I try to reach with patent owners in the context of industry
> standards is that
> (1) patent owners may choose to limit the scope of their patent license
> grants to compliant implementations, and
> (2) those patent licenses may not restrict anyone from creating and
> distributing non-compliant implementations.
>
> As to the specification copyright license, it is consistent with open source
> principles if it grants you permission to create derivative works of the
> specification.
So, is it reasonable to take the following approach:
- issue the specification itself under an existing open source license,
one that in and of itself does not grant any patent rights with respect
to implementations of the spec
- provide separately a patent-only license that grants patent rights
to compliant implementations of that specification (or broader if
one wishes)
rather than trying to bundle these together into a single open source
license? The patent-only license, not being a source license at all,
presumably does not have to be an open source license.
- Bob
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list