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On 03/08/2012 07:32 AM, Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:CB7E3536.14F26%25Nigel.Tzeng@jhuapl.edu"
type="cite">
As long as it's plainly stated that the license does not provide a
patent
license then users of the software can judge for themselves the
risks
involved. Just like they do with copyleft vs permissive licenses.</blockquote>
They can judge the risk regarding copyright-based licenses because
the copyrighted material is there in front of them. This is not the
case regarding patents.<br>
<br>
If I were to evaluate the U.S. patent risk for a company, a great
deal of the burden would be search and evaluation of a very large
collection of patents. The engagement would be around USD$100K, and
that's not counting what the attorney who gets my report would
charge. And there would be some big caveats in my report.<br>
<br>
The cost of engagement for evaluating risk and establishing policies
and processes for combining Open Source and proprietary software
would be less than 1/5 of that.<br>
<br>
It is not clear to me that the small and private Open Source
projects are at all equipped to perform the evaluation.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:CB7E3536.14F26%25Nigel.Tzeng@jhuapl.edu"
type="cite">
Frankly, it will likely be corporations that will avoid the use of
open source without explicit patent grants more often as a matter
of
policy.</blockquote>
No, they will prefer to <i>use </i>software with such grants
because it reduces their risk. What they worry about is <i>contributing</i>
their own work to such software. In general the ones who also have a
patent royalty business either refuse to make such contributions or
use intermediaries to develop them.<br>
<br>
If you want an organization that recommends licenses, the FSF is
happy to help. I agree that OSI should have a short-list of
recommended licenses, but the politics of dis-recommending some
organization's license are too much for them.<br>
<br>
Thanks<br>
<br>
Bruce<br>
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