For Approval: Educational Community License 1.0

[Matthew Flaschen]

John Cowan wrote:
> Brian Behlendorf scripsit:
> 
>> I don't see what you've suggested as being unique to the educational 
>> field - lots of large companies claim that it's impossible for them to 
>> keep track of their own IP, at first.  Lots of them have complex R&D 
>> projects that bind the resulting IP to exclusive licensing arrangements. 
> 
> Indeed, I would be very leery of accepting an exclusive licensing
> arrangement from anyone who would publicly admit to such administrative
> incompetence.  What surety is there that the patent I have licensed,
> supposedly exclusively, has not already been licensed exclusively
> to someone else?  Suing the university or company would be small
> satisfaction.

To be fair, the flaw is systemic, not merely specific to any one
organization's licensing procedures.  Even if the exclusive licenses
only applied to a single clearly defined patent, and no patent was ever
licensed twice, there could still be problems.  That's because approved
patents overlap with each other, and sometimes are almost identical.

Matt Flaschen