License Discussion for the Broad Institute Public License (BIPL)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 01:10:37AM +0200, Philippe Verdy wrote:

> My feeling about this issue isthat if the MIT cannot guarantee that 
> its BIPL-licence software does not contain any material covered by a 
> non-free patent, then the BIPL itself is definitely not free software. 
> This licence does not merit to be approved as an open-source licence 
> either, because users still need to look themselves for possible 
> patents covering the software.

There are many open source licenses (the BSD and MIT/X11 licenses, for 
instance) that do not require full disclosure of any patents that apply 
to the software.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org