4 ms·
Not clear what legal issues surround the release of patented (and licensed) source code. The whole idea behind a patent is to reveal the details of a technique
by CamperBob 15y ago
Not clear what legal issues surround the release of patented (and licensed) source code. The whole idea behind a patent is to reveal the details of a technique to the public.
- Jach 15y ago> The whole idea behind a patent is to reveal the details of a technique to the public. No it's not. That may have once been the ideal but has never been the case.
- burgerbrain 15y agoIt was in fact the idea, but never has effectively been the reality.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brown9-2 15y agoid doesn't hold the patent in question.
- CamperBob 15y agoDoesn't matter. There are no requirements to keep a patented implementation secret, unless for some reason they agreed to do so when they licensed the patent.
- rmgraham 15y agoUnder patent law any user would be violating the patent by playing the game (or possibly just having a copy on their computer), unless they bought a license from the patent holder or were covered by someone else's license. Yes, patent law is that ridiculous.
- sp332 15y agoThe point of a patent is to prevent other people from making things that implement your idea. The patent was licensed to id, but maybe the license only covered one project.
- lambda 15y agoThe issue is that they will be releasing the source under the GPL, which requires that you give anyone who receives the code a patent license, but they probably can't give a patent license as they can't sublicense the patent from Creative.
- rmc 15y agoid wants to release the code as GPL. To be GPL there can be no legal obstacle to distributing and modifying the code. The patent is not held by id, and I doubt the patent holders have allowed anyone to copy & use this patent as much as they want, ergo you can't copy & use the code as much as you want. So you can't release it under the GPL.