le mer 23-01-2002 à 13:30, Craig Dickson a écrit : > There was a discussion of this sort of question on the Ogg Vorbis list a > few months ago. We asked Richard Stallman for his opinion of what would > happen if someone had a patent for some algorithm, but released source > code for an implementation of that algorithm under the GPL. Here is the > crucial part of RMS's response: "... our lawyer recently told me that > any patent holder that releases a GPL-covered program which the patent > covers is implicitly licensing the patent for that use." (RMS, 18 > October 2001, email to jack@xiph.org, cc: vorbis@xiph.org) In other > words (this is my interpretation of RMS's words), you could use the > GPL'd code in accordance with the GPL, but you could not independently > implement the algorithm, nor use the code in a non-GPL context. [snip] It turns out that the license is GPL together with a license to whatever patents where needed for the codebase that was made GPL. So we have a license to use whatever patents are embedded in the current code, but if we extend it, we have to be careful to avoid infringing on additional patents. This seems good enough. Christian
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