Advice/suggestions on web-based software licensing and patents.

Hi all

I have written some software that the bosses are are interested in licensing. 
By 'licensing' they are not yet sure of what form but are talking with a company
and at this stage they are looking at what each side would like. It's early
stages yet and I am involved with the discussions so I can bring to their
attention issues such as open source licence issues and patents. 

What I though slug-chat could help with is any suggestions as to things to watch
out for, who has done this before with open source, anyone done patent checks in
Aust, and also what licence should we attach to the application.

Also am I right in my thinking here:

1. If this program is "distributed", i.e. we supply it on CD or ftp, we would
supply the source code for it for a one-off payment perhaps and the licensee
could modify it, further distribute it, sell it etc but they just have to
include the original licenses with it e.g. the MIT license. 

2. If this program is run as a hosted application on our premises we could keep
the code to ourselves and charge a licensee to use the web-based application. We
would not be 'distributing' it. But then it has effectively locked up stuff that
was originally open source and is not 'in the spirit' of open source. 
This is what the GPL Affero license tries to address.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

3. We could host it and charge a licensee to use the web-based application but
also release it as open source under a GPL3, GPL3 or GPL3 Affero license.
The BSD, Public Domain, MIT bits stay as that and our code is say GPL.
The licensee pays as they don't want the hassle of running it and we provide the
data content as I think that is where the real values lies. 
If our code is GPL then the licensee can't take it and run and lock up any
changes they make.

4. Our software may infringe on any number of software patents in the US. 
- Does Aust have software patents? Our licensee would be a US company so patents 
  would be an issue. 
- But what about if its hosted in Australia?
- Does the FTA mean that we are subject to US patent claims - I would think so.
- I presume it's difficult to find out if you breech patents unless 
  someone who owns a patent serves you with notice?
 
It can get so complicated so any suggestions most welcome.

SOME DETAILS:

Our software is a hosted web-based application. 
It does not use any GPL software (this was not by choice, it just happened that
the open source stuff I used was BSD, MIT etc). Here is what I use.

BSD: Django 
Common Public License Version 1.0: Graphviz
Public Domain: Sqlite Database
MIT License: Python Textile, Python Dot, Pyparsing, Javascript Sortable Tables

All code was written by myself and one other person as part of their employment.

Mike
-- 

Mike Lake

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