On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 02:46:37AM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > I think you must look at the entire picture --- not just the copyright > one --- to determine if software is free. I don't think its free if the > copyright holder decides to use patents, instead of copyright, to limit > your freedoms. In short: > > * If party A releases software, and in some maner prevents you > from excercising your DFSG-freedoms, then that software is not > DFSG-free. It doesn't matter if that manner is copyright, > patent, or the mafia. > * If party A releases software, and allows you all your > DFSG-freedoms but an unrelated party B does not allow you to > modify it to, e.g., play DVDs, party A's software is still free. > > To put it yet another way, you can't use patents as an end-run around > freeness. I entirely agree. It's not always easy to perform this sort of analysis, and we may be tricked from time to time through secret conspiracies between separate organizations, one of whom holds a copyright and the other who holds a patent implemented by the copyrighted code. It would not have been fair to penalize the authors of the GIMP for the hostile and malicious actions of Unisys regarding the LZW patent, so we did not. The case where the same organization holds a copyright and an applicable patent is a no-brainer, though. Both the patent and the copyright licenses must satisfy the DFSG, and furthermore, any subsequent transfer of either or both the copyright or patent to other parties must be closely scrunitized. As a rule of thumb, I'd say any such transfer should not be regarded as materially affecting the situation. A hypothetical: If Microsoft had a patent (free for use in "web browsers only") on HTTP and had licensed Internet Explorer under the GNU GPL, IE would have to go in non-free. If they then sold their patent to IBM, the situation would not change unless IBM then went and made the patent license fully DFSG-free. After all, we really have no way of knowing whether would Microsoft offered the HTTP patent to IBM for a steeply discounted price if IBM would agree to never relax the license terms on the patent. From what I recall of the Microsoft federal antitrust suit in the U.S., this sort of arrangment would be entirely within Microsoft's character. If a single organization (or multiple organizations when there is reason to believe collusion has taken place) asserts non-free copyright or patent licenses applicable to the same work, then the copyrighted implementation must be regarded as permanently tainted until both the copyright and patent license are made unambiguously DFSG-free. Organizations need to pay more than just lip service to freedom for us to recognize their participation in the Free Software community. Freedom which you cannot exercise is not freedom at all, and those responsible for preventing the exercise of freedom must be held to account. (Yes, I've been reading Chomsky lately. Does it show? :) ) -- G. Branden Robinson | Optimists believe we live in the Debian GNU/Linux | best of all possible worlds. branden@debian.org | Pessimists are afraid the optimists http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | are right about that.
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