Re: Old subject: Patents and hardware implementations
On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 09:33:53PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> [...]
>
> My personal opinion is that this is ok. This does not conflict with
> the DFSG because this is not software we are talking about and until
> now I haven't read a convincing argument that is does indeed relate to
> the "fields of endevour" clause (DFSG 6). Starting from a very na?ve
> position, yes, this is saying "you cannot use this for X", but the
> particular case in question makes it hard to come up with a realistic
> example. At the time of the original discussion, -legal seemed to
> agree that this is ok (IOW, noone actually said those terms make the
> license non-free).
>
If an entity who has a patent related to some software includes with that
software a statement which indicates that they will not use their patent to
convince a government to forcibly prevent others from using the subject of
the patent, it can not possibly make the software license non-free. In fact,
the software license is no more or less Free than it was to begin with.
Agreeing not to enforce a patent is a nice gesture. When that gesture
extends equally to all software under a particular set of licenses, it is
both compatible with the GNU GPL and our Debian Free Software Guidelines.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brian@ristuccia.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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