Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Sam Kuper]

On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 01:21:26PM -0700, Rosen Penev wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 6:09 AM Sam Kuper wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 10:55:37AM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote:
>>> 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 :
>>>>> 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/ .
>>
>> Here is an example of discussion on that list, that is on a similar
>> topic to the original question in this thread: patent-encumbered
>> software.  It also speaks to differences between the Debian and Red
>> Hat policies.
>>
>> (The example is 15 years old, so perhaps not representative of
>> current policy.  I'm just giving it as an example.)
>>
>>     [The] reason Debian continues to include the mp3 decoder library
>>     is that this patent, like so many other software patents, does
>>     not appear to be actively enforced.  This is the standard Debian
>>     uses in deciding whether to distribute the software; Red Hat
>>     evidently uses a different standard.
>
> Yep. And this is the issue. Which standard is to be followed, Red
> Hat's or Debian? [..]
> 
> I'd like a decision on this issue. [..]

Yes; that's why I suggested contacting SPI and/or SFC.*

Those organisations exist to help libre software projects to thrive.
They might be able to provide suitable legal advice to ensure that if
OpenWRT adopts a policy on how to deal with patented software, that
policy would be a well-informed one that provides the maximum benefit to
OpenWRT's users, within the OpenWRT devs' risk appetite.

I'm not an OpenWRT dev, so I don't think it would be appropriate for me
to contact SPI or SFC on behalf of OpenWRT; but you seem to be, so
perhaps you should?  Maybe CC, into that message, any other devs who are
interested in formulating an OpenWRT patent policy (and at least CC the
SPI OpenWRT liaisons, Imre Kaloz and John Crispin)?  And if you get any
useful info from SPI or SFC, then maybe use it to help formulate an
OpenWRT patent policy RFC and post it to this mailing list (e.g. as a
follow-up to this thread)?

(For an example of a recent OpenWRT RFC thread, see Paul Spooren's
thread on PKG_RELEASE policy.  To find the latter in your inbox, search
for Message-ID 5ee96304-afff-c527-4c52-a9704bb9b625 at aparcar.org .)

Good luck,

Sam

* Note 1: SFC is not to be confused with SFLC.  They are
different organisations run by different people.

Note 2: I would not recommend contacting SFLC, for the reasons given by
Matthew Garrett: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/49370.html .  This creates
a possible difficulty, insofar as SPI currently lists SFLC as its legal
advisor: https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/board/ .  A reasonable
solution to that difficulty would be that if you do contact SPI, you
could say in that message that you would prefer SPI not to contact SFLC
on your behalf without first checking with you.

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