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Subject: Re: [wsbpel] Licensing Issues With BPEL
you are correct - my issues are with the patent licenses. the copyright on the submitted spec is a different issue, and one that i have much less concern about. danny ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eckenfels. Bernd" <B.Eckenfels@seeburger.de> To: <wsbpel@lists.oasis-open.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 3:25 AM Subject: RE: [wsbpel] Licensing Issues With BPEL Hello Danny, note that the current License issues you rasied below are a great concern to us, too. But (as i personally understand it), one should also state, that those concerns do not apply to the BPEL spec, but to any IPR the licensees think they have, especially patents. The free use of the BPEL spec is granted in the pre-amble. No need to engage in agreements with the authors. And I guess the final TC draft will have the same kind of restrictions. Indeed i guess the patents would also apply to BPML or WS-C implementations. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Bernd Eckenfels Chief Architect -- SEEBURGER AG - Edisonstr.1 , D-75015 Bretten, Germany Fax: +49 (0)7252 96-2400 - Phone: +49 (0)7252 96-1256 mailto:b.eckenfels@seeburger.de - http://www.seeburger.de -----Original Message----- From: Danny van der Rijn [mailto:dannyv@tibco.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 12:12 AM To: wsbpel@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: [wsbpel] Licensing Issues With BPEL As has been pointed out many times to me, I am not a lawyer. However, given that I see no lawyers discussing these issues, that leaves it up to the technical committee to discuss these issues. Note that one does not have to be a lawyer to discuss legal issues. One only needs to be affected by the issues. The job of a lawyer is to codify intentions in an unambiguous, if often unintelligible, fashion. Those intentions must come from somewhere. And again, in the absence of other discussions taking place elsewhere, it is necessary to voice intentions in this committee that we wish to influence. At the end of the process of this technical committee, a vote will be taken on the specification. It will be the only vote. It is not possible, for instance to vote Yes on the technical merits of the specification, and No on the legal merits. We're only given one shot. If the goal of the specification is to become widely adopted, the current legal situation will prevent that, and therefore I believe that many of us will be forced to vote No. The following is a SHORT list that I came up with, in consultation with our lawyers. Note that any errors are mine, and were not made by my lawyers. These issues all assume that cross-licensing will take place. It would be all the better if the Author Companies put their IP in the public domain. ) Each of the 5 licenses comes with different verbiage, terms, and methods of executing them. The 5 companies should develop a standard agreement, with standard methods of execution. While there probably need to be 5 licenses, there is little reason that they should be separate. Our lawyer's conservative estimate is that the current 5 licenses would require about 8 hours of time from a lawyer at approximately $350/hour. That's $2800 for each licensee that's just sunk into wasted time. And that's if the company just wants to accept the terms at face value. ) How much will it cost for each anal legal department to ask some subset of these questions to the licensors and get them answered to their satisfaction? ) Just as an example of the differences, SAP says that we may refer to an executed agreement in press releases; IBM says we may not. A difference like this may seem trivial, but tracking these kinds of issues is expensive enough for a single agreement. ) Any license that is granted to us, MUST be sublicensable. The current license from SAP requires that if we OEM a product which contains BPEL, our OEM is not covered under our license. ) IBM prohibits a licensee from having products "being made by a third party." The prohibition is unclear as to whether it relates to contract companies either for development, testing, or manufacturing. ) SAP's license requires licensed companies to get consent from SAP in the event of a merger. That hardly seems RAND. If there is a desire to discuss a longer list, and I hope there will be, I can bring my lawyers back into the discussion. Danny van der Rijn TIBCO Software To unsubscribe from this mailing list (and be removed from the roster of the OASIS TC), go to http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/wsbpel/members/leave_workgroup.php. To unsubscribe from this mailing list (and be removed from the roster of the OASIS TC), go to http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/wsbpel/members/leave_workgroup.php.
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