On 2003-12-16 19:37:28 +0000 Michael Adams <mdadams@ece.uvic.ca> wrote:
What I ask is that you pleaseappreciate the world is far from ideal.
I can appreciate that, but can you please appreciate that your software licence is far from ideal?
I have received a number of rather unkind e-mail from some members of the open-source community.
Please name them. I have not been following this very closely and looking at the bug history didn't show any sign of it. Perhaps they are unrelated to Debian? If so, I assume you were just noting it and I'm sorry that you've had problems. Maybe your pseudo-free software licence raises false hopes in some. The JasPer page seems to claim that producing a free software and open source is your aim, so I can understand why that might happen.
As a result, the terms of the JasPer license cannot be dictated by me alone.
If you are a copyright holder, you seem to have a strong negotiating position. You can stop JasPer being distributed at all if you get undesirable terms, can't you?
troublesome issue is this: The JasPer Contributors might be held liable for the patent-infringing use of the JasPer software by *others*. This is a very serious concern. This is, in fact, theprimary reason why the license imposes the compliant-usage restriction.
Is there case history of this? I mean, I might be held liable for some terrorist attack on London, but it seems unlikely. Few others feel it necessary to go as far as you have with a patent self-defence clause, so it would be interesting to learn more about the reasoning.
-- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef@jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/