On Sun, 09 Nov 2003, Adam Warner wrote: > So you want companies to grant perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, > fully paid-up and royalty free patent licenses that are completely > irrevocable even when another company is using their software and > suing them for software patent infringement? What I'd like to see is perpetual, non-exclsive, worldwide, fully paid-up and royalty free patent licenses that are completely irrevocable when included in a work of Free Software or a derivative of such a work. Useage restrictions like this are, plain and simple, not free. Consider the following: Entity Alfred is using a piece of software which is essential to Alfred's business model that Entity Betty has developed. The software is licensed under a license with a reciprocity clause. Alfred also develops Free and proprietary softare, and has numerous Software Patents, some of which Betty is possibly infringing upon. Betty sues Alfred for software patent violations unrelated to tne pieces of software under discussion. Alfred cannot counter sue Betty without loosing the ability to use the piece of software developed by Betty, without which, Alfred would go out of business (or have to replicate at prohibitive costs.) > If a patent licence does not terminate under such circumstances then > a free software friendly company may have no useful negotiating > position whatsoever. We currently don't allow Free Software licenses to use copyright as a negotiating stick to beat upon their litigation opponents. If we were to allow such a clause for software patents, we might as well allow a similar reciprocity clause for software copyrights. Software patents are a serious problem, but restricting the usage of Free Software is not the solution. Don Armstrong -- Three little words. (In decending order of importance.) I love you -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/graphics/batch35.php http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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