Re: [fielding@apache.org: Review of proposed Apache License, version 2.0]

[bts@alum.mit.edu (Brian T. Sniffen)]

Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org> writes:

> On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 12:58:39AM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
>> > In the current patent-litigation context, a large stable of patents to
>> > cross-license is considered a vitally important corporate defense
>> > strategy.
>> 
>> Yes, but a patent could not be part of such a portfolio if if were
>> licensed freely to the general public.
>
> ... unless it's licensed with a condition that if you sue them, the
> patent grant is withdrawn.  That seems to be the purpose of the 
> reciprocity clause.
>
> It seems the intent is to require a patent license (under 4b), while
> still allowing those patents to be used defensively (against other
> patents).
>
> At least on its face, it seems like a useful compromise: companies
> often legitimately won't want to give out unrecovable patent licenses,
> since they need them to defend against other, hostile patent holders.
>
> Still undecided.  I can sympathise both with attempts to find defenses
> against patents (of which free software has scarce few), and to do so in
> a way that doesn't force others to weaken their own patent defenses.

My employer just hosted a lawyer to tell us all about the Dangers of
F/OSS (Free or Open Source Software).  His talk was largely FUD, but
one of the few pieces which found purchase with management was Patent
Litigation Fear:  that if we were using Mozilla (the MPL has a similar
clause) anywhere in the company, or even worse had standardized on it,
and got into a patent lawsuit with any Mozilla contributor, we could
lose our license to use Mozilla, or to distribute code which derived
from Mozilla.

That's just too scary to risk: if somebody else really does violate
one of our (non-software, even) patents, we have no recourse without
first switching to some other code base.  Yech.

That pretty much seems like a usage restriction: it restricts us from
doing things in private, based on our attempts to exercise *unrelated*
legal rights.

-Brian