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Free Patents
> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
> Ashar Aziz says:
> > Sun will license on a royalty-free basis the SKIP patents to all
> > comers. There will be a ONE-TIME fee of $99, which is required
> > for legal reasons, not financial. This is because the only
> > purpose of the license is defensive (Sun disclaims all liability)
> > and the reason for the fee is that contract law stipulates that
> > something of value has to exchange for a contract to bind.
>
That's called "consideration".
> Nominal fees of this sort are usually set at $1, not $99. I have never
> in all my years heard of a token consideration being set at
> $99. However, I refuse to pay even $1.
>
I'm with Perry on this one. I won't support any fee or even a license!
> In any case, I, for one, will not support ANY barriers to the use of
> IETF standard protocols. That means that it makes no difference what
> the fee is -- the problem is that paperwork has to be filed, which
> means that public implementations cannot be freely distributed and
> then commercially used.
>
We went round and round with this in the PPP WG for compression patents.
Finally, Stac agreed to let us use theirs for PPP links with no fee.
They even provided C source. The "consideration" was the listing of
Stac in printed documentation, same as Berkeley. Seemed easy enough.
The benefit to them is that they are in the chip business, so all those
free implementations floating around should have given their business a
boost. And free implementations wouldn't have had the resources to pay,
so they get name recognition where they would have had none before.
Well, we still needed to get signed copies of these "free" licenses. It
turns out to be quite a hassle! Multiple copies wending their way back
and forth, contract language problems, lawyers, etc.
I'm a co-author of the Stac internet-draft, and *I* still don't have a
license!
Bill.Simpson@um.cc.umich.edu