License Discussion for the Broad Institute Public License (BIPL)

[Zac Bowling]

"magic patent verbs"...

mystical and more magical then david blaine in a fish bowl.

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 22:25 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> 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.
> 
-- 
Zac Bowling <zac at zacbowling.com>