Re: RAND & W3C Standards

On October 8, 2001 02:12 am, Paul Dundas wrote:
> 2) If it is not acceptable to grant a royalty-free license to all and 
> sundry then, as a minimum, royalty-free licenses must be available for 
> non-commercial, open-source implementations of the standard.

The non-commericial restriction would not be compatible with the GPL:

    "We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
    program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
    program proprietary.  To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
    patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all"
    (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html)

--
Daniel

Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 05:07:49 UTC