Christopher K. St. John writes:
> This is clearly a lawyer problem, not a GPL problem.
No it appears to be the problem of people interpreting a license that is not
very clear about patent invalidation.
Let me be clear about the issue again. If someone reverse engineers a
proprietary protocol and releases a decoder under GPL, whether or not a company
chooses to pursue the individual as a patent infringement issue is not the
issue being debated.
If engineers working on the proprietary protocol have filed for patent, but to
make troubleshooting simpler want to release a decoder of the protocol, there
is a problem. The owner of a patent (or having expressed intent by filing for
it), has to release the source code for the protocol, today it has to be
GPL. This potentially can invalidate the patent. This *is* the issue.
I'm posting as an engineer who sees the license change as a way to make more
decoders available. I'm not in marketing interested in spreading FUD. If you
can point out how making the license change is going to be problematic to
developers, I'd be happy to consider it.
Dinesh
>
> Either the plugin is covered by the patent or not. If it is not,
> then there is no way the GPL can invalidate the patent, and
> there is no need to change the license. If the plugin is covered
> by the patent, then no one except Cisco or a patent licensee is
> allowed to write any plugin, under any license at all, that
> decodes Cisco-patented protocols. The fact that the GPL mentions
> the word "patent" isn't really relevant, since the logic applies
> to all licenses.
>
> OTOH, if there are other, non-Cisco FUD related reasons to
> change the license, that's a different matter. Something to
> consider : Having the GPL on a successful application like Ethereal
> puts a great deal of pressure on vendors to donate source code.
> This results in a higher-quality product for users, and makes
> it easier for Ethereal developers to evolve the code without
> stranding users. Changing the license removes that pressure, and
> results in binary-only plugins and all the pain that implies.
> As was mentioned earlier in the thread, it's still possible
> (maybe, see patent isssues above) to release an open source plugin
> if there is a binary plugin available, but why not keep up the
> pressure to have source code released in the first place?
--
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe