[Discuss] ZFS

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:51 PM,  <matt at ciranttechnologies.com> wrote:
>
>> No matter who you are, no matter what open source license you release
>> something under, if you are the copyright holder, you have the right to
>> re-release your code under any new license you want, and you have the
>> right
>
> Yes, re-release under a new license, but that doesn't invalidate the
> previous code/license. ?Anything forward released would be under that new
> license.
>
>> Sorry, that's incorrect. ?If somebody patents something, and later
>> somebody
>> else releases an open-source thing which violates that patent, then the
>> patent holder has grounds for legal action, against the producers,
>
> Yeah, against commercial vendors, not end users.

I'm 99% sure that Ed was right.   In that RMS' video being discussed
on a different thread, he talks about patents as being about using
something not making/distributing it and that end users can be sued
directly.   You and I might not be worth their while to sue, but if
Amazon started using ZFS implementations in Linux/FreeBSD as part of
EC2 they might get a call.

Bill Bogstad