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On Thursday 09 August 2007 14:10, jtd wrote:
[snip] In the usa (and probably "as such" in India) he can patent some piece of drivel and pump it into the modem. then tieup with bsnl not to sue BSNL customers buying the modem. So if you bought a bsnl modem, demanded and recieved the code, then re-cross-compiled (or dd the rom binary) and pumped the code into your own design modem / 386box / whatever he can sue you.
I very much doubt if a court would uphold an action against you by a provider if you compile and use a piece of code that the provider himself supplied you with. If they did, I'm getting busy patenting algorithm foo, embedding it into a piece of GPLv2 code and allowing everyone to download and use that code. 2 months later I'll sue them all for patent violation, make lots of money, unsubscribe from all mailing lists and go and live a life of luxury beyond my wildest dreams in the Himalayas.
M$ Novell deal does something similiar with the added M$ innovation of claiming 200 odd undisclosed patents. So the gplv3, which irons out the corner-cases-now-mainstream of distribution thru services/ lease/ third party paten truce/ embeded/ and such other subterfuges.
Regards,
- -- Raju "I know how to spell y-o-u" Mathur - -- Raj Mathur raju@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ Freedom in Technology & Software || September 2007 || http://freed.in/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F It is the mind that moves