Promises From Patent Holders
Some software companies who hold significant patent portfolios have made non-aggression pledges to the free software community. These have varied in scope and have received a variety of responses. IBM, Sun, and Nokia are three examples. These have been described by Richard Stallman as "significant", "not really anything", and "next to nothing", respectively.
Microsoft has pledged not to assert any claims against open source developers which CEO Steve Ballmer called "an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies." This pledge has been accepted with some skepticism.
Read more about this topic: Software Patents And Free Software
Famous quotes containing the words promises, patent and/or holders:
“Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities—a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The cigar-box which the European calls a “lift” needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like the man’s patent purge—it works”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and
lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)