brainstorms

Wednesday October 05, 2005

style and substance in patent licenses

adobe's tentative dng patent license:

Grant of Rights
Subject to the terms below and solely to permit the reading and writing of image files that comply with the DNG Specification, Adobe hereby grants all individuals and organizations the worldwide, royalty-free, non-transferable, non-exclusive right under all Essential Claims to make, have made, use, sell, import and distribute Compliant Implementations.

compare this to sun's non-assertion covenant for oasis open document format:

Sun irrevocably covenants that, subject solely to the reciprocity requirement described below, it will not seek to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification, or of any subsequent version thereof ("OpenDocument Implementation") in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation, as defined by the rules of OASIS, to grant (or commit to grant) patent licenses or make equivalent non-assertion covenants.

[i was surprised to learn about the patent claims for the dng spec. down that road, i would have much preferred a no-nonsense, sun-style irrevocable covenant for dng.]