apt, urpmi, rpm patented?

[Jamon Camisso]

Marc Lijour wrote:
> Another controversial topic:
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14217
> 
> http://esoft.com/company/press_detail1.cfm?ID=102

IANAL, but I'd say that is an essentially spurious clam of OSnews -- I 
don't know how rpm, yum, etc. are licensed but they've been around for 
much longer than the patent awarded to eSoft "by the U.S. Patent and 
Trademark Office on November 1, 2005."

Perhaps if those tools are not patented under the GPL1/2 (GPL3 has 
patent sections I think) then the claim might have some merit as applied 
to open source package management etc., though still totally 
unenforceable if actually applied to our tools of choice -- I'd still 
keep using rpm deb etc. In fact, if it ever came to it that our package 
management systems were threatened, some solidarity amongst users and 
distributions might emerge, actually benefiting the community. Purely 
speculation there though.

Jamon

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