License Discussion for the Broad Institute Public License (BIPL)

[John Cowan]

Matthew Garrett scripsit:
> 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.

However, the MIT/X license does use the magic patent verbs, so it is
at least an implicit patent grant.

-- 
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:                       John Cowan
Never in the field of human computing           cowan at ccil.org
has so much been paid by so many                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to so few! (pace Winston Churchill)