OpenID IPR Policy Draft

[Martin Atkins]

Recordon, David wrote:
> 
> http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/IPR_Policy
> 

Is it really possible to use mailing list subscription as a trigger for 
a contract like this? The whole idea scares me a little bit, to be honest.

It seems more sensible to me to put these restrictions on actual 
*contributions*: require that any proposal or concrete 
specification/implementation offered via the mailing lists or other 
"official" channels to come with patent disclosure, and only *then* are 
any undisclosed patents assumed to constitute a royalty-free, perpetual 
licence.

As it is currently written, I think lots of companies that retain 
software patents of any kind — or even ones that don't but may wish to 
in the future — would be put off contributing due to the risk that their 
patents may be implicitly licenced to everyone.

I'm not a lawyer, of course. However, not everyone who could potentially 
be affected by this is a lawyer either, so putting in stuff that 
potentially scares non-lawyers like myself is probably a bad idea.