Re: Intel's drivers license

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de> wrote:

> Intel hereby grants Recipient and Licensees a non-exclusive,
> worldwide, royalty- free patent license under Licensed Patents to
> make, use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise transfer the
> Software, if any, in source code and object code form. This license
> shall include changes to the Software that are error corrections or
> other minor changes to the Software that do not add functionality or
> features when the Software is incorporated in any version of a
> operating system that has been distributed under the GNU General
> Public License 2.0 or later.  This patent license shall apply to the
> combination of the Software and any operating system licensed under
> the GNU Public License version 2.0 or later if, at the time Intel
> provides the Software to Recipient, such addition of the Software to
> the then publicly available versions of such operating system
> available under the GNU Public License version 2.0 or later (whether
> in gold, beta or alpha form) causes such combination to be covered
> by the Licensed Patents. The patent license shall not apply to any
> other combinations which include the Software. No hardware per se is
> licensed hereunder.

This rather long paragraph means that I can't take out some code
covered by patents and use it to extend my favorite text editor.  That
would count as an additional restriction, and thus GPL-incompatible.
This is different from the real-time Linux patents, which allow for
any implementation as long as it is under the GPL.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu