Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Sam Kuper]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 07:11:13PM +0300, Etienne Champetier wrote:
> Le lun. 3 août 2020 à 00:04, Rosen Penev a écrit :
>> The remerged OpenWrt project is legally represented by the Software
>> in the Public Interest (SPI) - an US 501(c)(3) non-profit
>> organization which is managing our OpenWrt trademark, handling our
>> donations and helping us with legal problems.
> 
> Software Freedom Conservancy (future replacement of SPI) is also US
> based
> 
>> Whenever discussion about patents arise, I usually point to Fedora
>> whose parent company is Red Hat, which is based in the US. There are
>> many things that they do not distribute that OpenWrt does for legal
>> reasons. Should Fedora's practices be mirrored or should a more
>> liberal policy regarding patented functionality be taken?

For OpenWRT at least, might Debian be a more appropriate exemplar than
Fedora?  Unlike Fedora AFAIK, but like OpenWRT, Debian is represented in
some sense by SPI: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/debian/ .

The debian-legal mailing list archives can be searched for the decisions
taken by the debian-legal team, and the reasoning behind those
decisions: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ .

In cases where doubt still remains, OpenWRT devs should probably consult
with staff of the SPI (currently, the project liaisons are listed as
John Crispin and Imre Kaloz: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/openwrt/ )
and/or with staff of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  IMO, this should
be done via a publicly archived mailing list, for transparency.


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