Weekly Engineering News 35/2008

[Holger Freyther]

On Wednesday 03 September 2008 23:05:27 Alan Cox wrote:
> > So for the two patents, I won't sign them, they go back to our parent
> > company FIC and most likely they will file them under their name.
> > Basically Openmoko donated them to FIC. Meanwhile we are working with
> > the SFLC on a much better solution...
>
> What Red Hat did was to fashion a patent promise using estoppel. It means
> we can patent stuff (alas we have no real choice) and avoid it harming
> free software while being able to do things like use it to protect free
> software against proprietary nasties.

The lack of such a policy[1] was a reason to not start at a toolkit provider 
that was recently acquired by a big company from Finland. The unique 
situation of Openmoko is that we produce Hardware as well. So which licenses 
make sense for Hardware products?

z.


[1] http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html