[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Gnus (newsreader) licensing
|
From: |
Phillip Lord |
|
Subject: |
Re: Gnus (newsreader) licensing |
|
Date: |
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 23:38:59 +0000 |
|
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.0.90 (gnu/linux) |
"Ayappan P2" <ayappap2@in.ibm.com> writes:
> We are porting Emacs to IBM AIX operating system. As of part of getting
> legal approval for any opensource software, we do code scan.
>
> While doing the code scan of Emacs, we encountered the following patent
> statements regarding slave Gnusae.
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Slave-Gnusae.html
>
> Does this mean we should not be using this feature freely ?
It's undoubtedly a joke, as well as being legal nonsense. You can't
"take out copyright" -- it's automatic. And you can't copyright two
words. It might have been possible to patent "master/slave" but if you
were doing so, you wouldn't explain it in a free manual. But in this
case, there is a lot of prior art.
Phil