[Nel] Copyright, Patents and the GPL
Olivier Lejade
lejade@nevrax.com
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