[wine] Re: Software patents

[Mike McCormack]

David Lee Lambert wrote:

> Would Wine be able to proceed if we got the following statement from them?
> 
> "Borland hereby grants a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to
> use the methods described in U.S. patent 5,628,016 to the current Wine
> developers when they use the current LGPL source-code for wine, and to
> anyone who properly recieves a copy of that source-code or properly
> creates a derivative work based on it when they use said copy or
> derivative work."
> 
> I think this would satisfy the conditions in section 11 of the LGPL.  In 
> absence of communication from Borland,  we might also infer this based on 
> their future public statements.

I'm not a laywer, and I don't really want to start a debate on this, but 
my opinion is:

It would need to be granted to gcc, not Wine, since gcc would be 
generating the exception handling code.  To be properly compatible with 
the GPL, I'd guess it would have to be granted to any project that 
wished to use it with GPL licensed software, not just gcc.

Mike