My friend Stefano Forenza just wrote a blog post in which he gives (among a whole lot other things) an excellent example on what a good patent covenant is supposed to look like:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification.
If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
I like this: short, straight to the point, unambigous. I wish other companies could take inspiration from Google for their own covenants.
June 14, 2009 at 22:19 |
Shut up, I didn’t subscribe to planet debian rss to read this crap.
June 14, 2009 at 22:42 |
Why do you say that?
June 15, 2009 at 03:01 |
Ha, I think you’ve been trolled. Best to just delete this thread and improve the signal-to-noise ratio on the web just a bit.
June 15, 2009 at 00:14 |
@A:
WTF???? Debian planet is not a publication lead by a team of professional editors =DDDDD
Made me laugh anyways. I can see the future:”Oooh I got my post into planet debian” and everyone goes WOW.
June 15, 2009 at 03:19 |
A: “Shut up, I didn’t subscribe to planet debian rss to read this crap.”
Patents, whether we like it or not, have a lot of impact on Free Software (see the Mono fiasco), and, by extension, Debian. Also, this is good news; every big company is not crazy.
June 15, 2009 at 07:54 |
[...] sources of opposition suggest that defense of Mono proponents is very weak and a detailed breakdown is offered to explain [...]