Red Hat Makes Patent Promise

colonel writes "In a followup to an earlier story about Red Hat filing for software patents, a "promise" has appeared on RedHat's website stating that they do not intend to pursue patents against software licensed under a specific set of licenses. It's not binding in perpetuity, and some licenses are notably absent in the list of approved licences, like the LGPL. But, at least Red Hat's made their intentions clear now."

Comments

Re:Rhetoric to appease the zealots.

[Satan's Librarian]

And just how does this limit the free as in speech software? If anything, I'd say their promise will help protect it. Without holding patents, what would happen if, say, Linux happened to violate patent "US5930831: Partition manipulation architecture supporting multiple file systems" with it's partitioning tools? Or worse yet, if RPM happened to violate "US6381742: Software package management" held by Microsoft? You can read 'em at the US patent office , or Delphion if you register. At least with RedHat's patents and their promise, they might be able to discourage attacks with the threat of a counter-attack.

They should be applauded. The GPL license enforces the honesty of their promise where the two meet in code, and to me at least it seems like they are fully aware of that and did it intentionally to protect the open source community from likely attacks.

Re:Good show, Redhat.

[Uruk]

I agree, it is a positive move for Red Hat.

I don't mean to criticize them, but sometimes I do wish that people would spend as much time trying to do something about current patent law as they do "playing the patent game". Sure, there's the reasonable realistic drive to try to make the patent game work on free software's terms, but the system is so broken sometimes I'm not entirely sure that's wise or possible.

Red Hat though seems to be making a lot of their money these days on server machines. The suits buying and running these servers don't give a damn about Red hat's policy either way on patents - I wonder why they did this in terms of marketing. Which particular demographic they are appealing to?

Of course, you might say none - they're just doing the right thing. But the cynical part of me wonders... :)