[PD] Percolate

Ivica Ico Bukvic ico.bukvic at gmail.com
Wed Mar 7 20:42:30 CET 2007


> I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, source or binary doesn't
> matter: As long as you distribute a flext-external, source or binary,
> you have to distribute it as GPL. This is impossible without violating
> either the Percolate license or the GPL, because both are
> incompatible: the Percolate license isn't a free license.
> 
> > Also, how does this affect Stk+flext, since Stk's license is not GPL
> > either?
> 
> The Stk-license is perfectly compatible with the GPL, it's almost a
> public domain license and doesn't try to restrict use and distributiom
> in a way, as Percolate's license does. So there are no problems
> linking flext and stk.

While I can see your point, one thing that confuses the heck out of me is
the following excerpt from the STK license:

"Some of the concepts are covered by various patents, some known to us and
likely others which are unknown.  Many of the ones known to us are
administered by the Stanford Office of Technology and Licensing."

Obviously, I am not a lawyer either, but I thought that GPL was not
patent-compatible. If someone's source is potentially infringing upon a
patent, (which I am not claiming that STK is--I am speaking here purely
hypothetically), my rather limited [mis]understanding of licenses is that
they do not have the right to grant permissions to others to use patented
code of a patent that is not theirs...

This is why I thought that "educational use" ought to do it, but then again,
what do I know? ;-)

Best wishes,

Ico






More information about the Pd-list mailing list