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Glenn Strong writes:
On Thursday, May 26, 2005 at 16:39 +0100, Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
"The Patent Statement applies to Nokia's patents infringed by current official releases of the Linux Kernel and all future official releases of the Linux Kernel to the extent that Nokia has not declared new functionality embodied in such releases to be outside the scope of the Patent Statement."
That implies that Linux currently infringes some of Nokia patents. Is this likely to be true?
It's hard to say - there's no list at the Nokia site of the specific patents they might be thinking of.
The announcement could certainly be read as applying to any patents that may currently be infringed, if there are any -- Nokia might not even have compiled a list (it would be a lot of work to check, I suspect, particularly if they hold patents with very broad claims).
They are obviously intending to imply that open source can coexist with software patents, but I think the announcement is a great example of them shooting themselves in the foot on this count.
- Nokia is implying that the kernel already infringes some unspecified number of their patents (BAD),
- they're saying that they're permitting current kernel source to be used by third parties without danger of a lawsuit from Nokia (GOOD),
- but they're saying nothing about future kernel sources (BAD),
- or any other open source code (BAD).
So fwiw, I read three threats there, and not a lot of niceness. not so friendly after all! ;)
It's a shame, because that Nokia device looks *nice* and the development env rocks! http://taint.org/2005/05/25/184359a.html
(PS: they also seem to imply that they have patents on their cross-compilation development system, too. cross-compilation for embedded systems is pretty generic stuff going back to the 70's -- sounds like they're really getting into the idea of trivial software patents. but of course, I have no idea which patents they might be or what they claim.)
- --j.