[cfe-dev] Status of SEH?

[Chris Lattner]

On Jan 30, 2014, at 5:02 PM, Daniel Berlin <dannyb at google.com> wrote:

>>> Don't take this the wrong way, but most people would still understand
>>> that this probably means "don't talk about patents except to the
>>> oversight group".  There are roughly no open source projects where
>>> the
>>> rule is "talk about patents all you like on random development
>>> mailing
>>> lists"
>>> 
>> 
>> To be fair, as I read it, the "Please contact the oversight group for more details." applies only to the situation discussed in the previous sentence (dealing with the "If you or your employer own the rights to a patent and would like to contribute..." situation). If we expect that all patent discussions, regardless of the relationship to the rights holders, will take place *only* with the oversight group, then we need to amend the current wording to make that unquestionably clear.
> 
> We expect that contributors will notify the oversight group if they
> have patent concerns.
> We expect that otherwise, patent discussions will not take place on
> the public development mailing lists.
> 
> I'd be glad to see wording someone wants to use here (i didn't write
> the current language) :)

I agree, we should be more clear about this on the developer policy.

Alp, the problem with discussion on the mailing list is twofold: 1) for almost everyone, patent discussion is speculation, because they are not a patent attorneys.  Patent law doesn't make sense, and applying logic to it only makes things worse.  2) when patents get discussed, invariably people get irritated about the state of the patent system and the discussion spirals off in an off topic way.  I'd rather that the community stay productive and focused on technical matters, while people who understand this discuss it offlist.

Thanks!

-Chris