More on Nokia’s patent pledge
Herkko Hietanen notes that maybe Nokia’s patent pledge is not as restrictive as I thought:
Anonymoys reader makes a good remark in his comment about the Nokias gesture.
“That is, since they are publishing the kernel source (and applications) covered under the GPL, they can’t impose additional conditions — such as keeping current on patent royalties — on the use of that code. In fact, their obligations extend beyond their announcement. If I extract code from the kernel and put it in my program, they can’t enforce patents on that either.”
GPL does that. Nokia had to make the announcement. They distribute Linux hence any of their patents must be available to use with Linux under GPL.
