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Re: DFSG-freeness of Apache Software Licenses



On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 12:15, Joe Schaefer wrote:
> Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 14:02, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> > 
> > > The act of running the Program is not restricted by the proposed Apache
> > > license either.  We don't need to list all of the things that are not
> > > restricted by the license.
> > 
> > It is if your patent license is revoked.
> 
> Software that is licensed to you under the GPL, for which you 
> subsequently use in a patent-infringing way, is no different
> in this regard.  You are not free use GPL software to violate 
> the law, not even if you refuse to accept its terms.

Quite. However, with GPL software, I don't have to worry about the
copyright holder claiming patent infringment against me for patents used
by the software as distributed by him. If my patent grants under the
proposed Apache license are terminated, I do.

Please see my full rationale in
    Message-ID: <[🔎] 1068968797.3951.14.camel@bohr.local>
which is archived at
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200311/msg00145.html


> My interpretation of the FSF's comments on the license@ list
> are that, in their view, a GPL-v2 licensor _implicitly_ 
> forfeits any patent claims that would apply to the licensed
> software.  However, that fact alone does not imply the proposed
> license is _incompatible_ with the GPL-v2: an author of a 
> derivative work may be willing to forfeit such patent claims
> without insisting that the authors of the original work forfeit
> theirs also.

I'm not following you. An author of a derivative work can certainly add
exceptions to the GPL, just like they often do to allow linking to
OpenSSL. However, that doesn't make the OpenSSL license GPL-compatible.

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