On 08/07/2014 01:59 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 07/08/14 03:23, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
Part of http://faif.us/cast/2014/aug/05/0x4B/ with Fontana and VanL concerned a desire for patent grant covering more than just contributor's contributions/in combination with work, or whole work at time of contributor's contributions (as I [mis]understand them, Apache2 and EPL do former, MPL2 and GPL3 latter).
MPL does the former - see section 2.3 c) in MPL 2 and 2.2 b) in MPL 1.1.
Thanks! I glazed over 2.3 c). By the way, I notice on http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPL_and_patents some confusion similar to mine. I added to discussion there noting your correction.
I was kind of hoping that I'd discover recent copyleft-next commits adding patent coverage beyond single work, but alas. Any in the pipeline? What are the possible scopes of coverage beyond single work?
Coverage beyond a single work is presumably a patent pool?
That's what exists now (OIN was briefly mentioned in the podcast) in addition to standards contribution requirements (not mentioned).
I could imagine a project rejecting contributions from non-members of relevant patent pool (which for many projects might mean creating one) instead of or as part of a CLA, but assume there's some benefit to having free software license be the sole terms for all contributors and users, thus encouraging speculation about how free software licenses might be improved, which this forum seems to tolerate. :)
Mike