Article: Yodaiken clarifies the Open RTLinux Patent License
Mar 26, 2002 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — 2 viewsThe following is a response by Victor Yodaiken, holder of a key software patent which covers portions of the RTLinux real-time extension to Linux, to the article at LinuxDevices.com entitled “RTAI goes (partly) GPL” . . .
Sometimes legal documents are obscure, but in the case of the Open RTLinux Patent License, I hope it is clear that, use of the Patented Process is permitted, without fee or royalty, when used “by software licensed under the GPL.” The License does not extend to . . .
- “software partially licensed under the GPL”,
- “software split into components so that some of it is
licensed under the GPL and the valuable part is not”
- “kind of sort of GPL software”,
- “I think this really meets the intentions of the GPL software “
- “This used to be GPL before we removed the copyright notices software” and so on.
The “approved uses” under the Open RTLinux Patent License are “by software licensed under the GPL” or “by software that executes within an Open RTLinux Execution Environment”. If you want to make, use, sell, distribute, import, etc. non-GPL software — regardless of whether such software is labeled as an “application,” “module,” or anything else — please make sure you have obtained competent legal advice regarding whether your software and its use is an approved use under the Open RTLinux Patent License or whether a license under the RTLinux patent must be secured to authorize your software and its use.
The GPL is really about reciprocity. We are happy to donate GPL rights to the open source community because we know that others making use of this technology are required to contribute their enhancements and improvements back to the community. We did not donate anything to non-GPL software developers.
Victor Yodaiken
Finite State Machine Labs: The RTLinux Company.
www.fsmlabs.com
www.rtlinux.com
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