Subject: [Nel] Copyright, Patents and the GPL

From: Olivier Lejade <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2001 15:10:14 +0200

Wow, I'm out of town for three days and I miss all the fun ! :)
Anyway, here goes my 0.02$.

About the "game rules" issue:
John and Dave pretty much hit the nail on the head, so I won't go into an 
extended rant. I'll only add that although you could probably (as Dave 
mentionned) patent your rules *in the US*, it would most certainly be a bad 
idea as it is very expensive and time consuming to fill such a patent and 
numerous countries will not recognize it anyway.
Keep in mind that software and business method patents are highly 
objectionable in the first place. You can read more about this subject here:
http://www.freepatents.org/
and here:
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/against-software-patents.html

European citizens should also consider signing the petition against 
software patents:
http://petition.eurolinux.org/index.html?LANG=en

As for the Pro/Anti GPL debate:
Stephane Craux, I'm afraid you are *completely* missing the point of Free 
Software. If you are genuinely interested in learning about it and 
understanding what it stands for, I strongly suggest you spend some time 
reading the texts on the GNU project's "philosophy" page:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
But I suspect you're only trolling... :(

Finally, for those who still have questions about NeL's license, don't 
forget: the GPL FAQ is your friend !
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html

Hope this helps !

O.

-- Nevrax --
Olivier Lejade
CEO and co-founder
www.nevrax.com