[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Lars PLEASE read the license before you comment.
>
> Of course I have read the short license text at
> http://www.waveprotocol.org/patent-license
>
> It says that as long as we follow Google's protocol standard, they
> won't sue us for infringing on their patents ("patents necessarily
> infringed by implementation of this specification").  Oh, how very
> generous.  But what if we want to implement some of their features
> in MediaWiki without following their protocol?  That is where we
> should be worried.  What exactly is it that they have patented?

Assuming Google is intending to be "not evil" about this, I would
guess the point of the intellectual property (e.g. patents and
trademarks) is to prevent people from creating things that are called
and/or identify themselves as Wave servers and yet don't conform to
the communications protocol.  And there is a reasonable point there.
Regardless of what features and services a server might offer, it is
still important that the underlying communications protocol be
something that all parties can make sense of, otherwise your network
gets bogged down in gibberish.

Anyway, that's the optimistic interpretation.

-Robert Rohde