Working Toward a Patent-Agnostic Open Source License

Glyn Moody writes "Are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source license? That's the question posed by a new license that is being submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for review. The MPEG Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) standard as open source, but it also wants to be able to sell patent licenses. If it can't, it might not make the implementation open source; but if it does, it might undermine the fight against software patent proliferation."

Comments

Re:This Doesn't Make a Whole Lot of Sense

[jvillain]

I think it boils down to this. The open source community can feel free to contribute code and documentation to our project. But we will feel free to keep you from being able to run it on an open source platform and we have the force of patents to stop you. If you want to fork the code we just drop the patent bomb.

The MPEG group and the other douche bags they hang with are the most anti open source group there is. Am I ever going to play Blu-ray movies on my Linux computer? Not likely.

Re:wrong word in article title

[Mr. Slippery]

Agnostics believe that neither the existence nor the non-existence of God can be proven.

"Agnostic" comes from roots meaning "not knowing", but its use in the sense of "not having an opinion about" is well-established.

But honestly, would it KILL you to learn what these words mean before you use post them on a widely read public forum?

Would it kill you to check a dictionary before trying to go all vocabulary-Nazi on someone? :-)