eekee wrote:
I don't think they'd lose their rights to anything if they sued 3rd-party exfat developers
Not any 3rd-party developers, but the ones who create derivative work of the GPL'd Linux exFAT driver. And yes, GPL explicitly states that in that case you must stop distributing the Program under GPL.
eekee wrote:
Besides, I don't think a patent lawsuit over an independant implementation could have anything to do with the copyright on Linux's exfat driver.
Of course not, but we weren't talking about independent implementations. We were talking about MS suing a derivative work of the GPL'd Linux exFAT driver.
StudyCaps wrote:
No licence can transfer copyright ownership though
Gigasoft wrote:
Contributors have explicitly signed away their copyright to FSF
Which one is it then? Can they or can they not transfer the copyright? (In my country's law you can't, copyright always belongs to the author and to the author only. A company or organization can only have the copyright if the software was created on a machine owned by them and written by an employee paid by them to write that particular software.) And what does this has to do with patent licensing anyway?
FYI I'm more interested in the patents related to GPL:
Fact1: Linux is GPLv2 licensed.
Fact2: Linux has an exFAT driver, for which MS gave up it patent rights to charge for royalty (GPL mandates this plus MS has announced this).
Fact3: GPL explicitly forbids non-free patents, and states derivative works must also be patent-free (free here means free of royalty, MS of course still owns the patents).
So on what legal base could hypothetically MS sue an exFAT driver which is a derivative of the Linux exFAT driver and adheres to GPL terms? I think there's none.
Cheers,
bzt