- From: John K. Hohm <jhohm@acm.org>
- Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 12:05:09 -0600
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I am mostly in favor of the posted draft patent policy. However, there is one serious problem with the proposed policy that would render it useless for protecting my (and others') rights to write Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and similar licenses that restrict further restrictions. The problem lies in clause 3 of Section 3, which states that the license "may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation". That clause can be taken to mean that software which is written to implement the Recommendation, and then used in part for another purpose, could violate a patent that otherwise satisfied the policy. The GPL does not allow the use of licensed software to be restricted in such a way as would be required to avoid violating a patent that uses clause 3.
Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 02:06:51 UTC