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FSF's Position On Proposed W3C "RF" Patent Policy

Posted by timothy on from the technical-difficulties dept.

bkuhn writes "FSF released its position on the proposed W3C 'RF' patent policy. W3C's proposed policy is a step in the right direction (compared to RAND), but because of 'field of use' restrictions, it is in fact not a Free-Software-friendly policy. The Free Software community is encouraged to say so in their comments on the last call draft."

1 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Re:does anybody care by diaphanous · · Score: 3, Informative

    And they're shameless about it, too! If you want to donate some code to the FSF, they demand that you sign over the copyright on the code to them! We had some legacy software here (I work for Lockheed in Fort Worth, and we have a collection of Ada libraries that we don't use any more) that we wanted to donate to the FSF and they said that they wouldn't accept it unless we signed over the copyright to them!

    They have good reasons for this policy. If you think this is only a theoretical concern, look up the early history of the development of GNU Emacs. RMS originally based GNU Emacs off code whose copyright had not been assigned to the FSF, but which he had been told he had permission to use by a contibuter to the original codebase. He was later forced to remove that code after being threatened by a company who had bought the copyright from another contributer (James Gosling) to that project.

    This infomation can be found here. Do a search for "Gosling", to find the relevant part.

    ~Phillip