[Accessibility] Resent: Suggested Position on Standards and Patents

[Peter Korn]

Hi Olaf,

I believe the Sun statement on patents with respect to Open Document 
implementors can be found at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.php

How is that as a template for what we might do for FSG-A standards?


Peter

Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I sent this suggestion to this list two months ago, but for some reason we did 
> not discuss it then:
> 
> "Software patents have a negative impact on accessibility if they restrict the 
> implementation of standards, or if they restrict the implementation of 
> software to read or write formats for data storage or data exchange. This is 
> especially true if the patent is licensed under terms that discriminate 
> against particular vendors, users or implementors, or against open source 
> licenses.
> The standard issued by this working group must therefore either be free of 
> software patents, or there must be a suitable license. All parties 
> participating in this working group declare that they do not own and do not 
> know of applicable patents, unless the patents are licensed under the 
> following terms:
> * The patent is licensed for use in software shipped under any OSI approved 
> license.
> * The patent is available under reasonable and non-discriminative terms 
> that place no restrictions on the developers rights to deploy (or not) their 
> own source code or the compiled software.
> * The patent license offer must be unrevokable except for cases where the 
> licensor is sued for patent infringement by the licensee."
> 
> Olaf
> 
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