Don Armstrong wrote:
If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as
of the date such litigation is filed.[2]
My personal feeling is that these clauses amount to a useage
restriction, and thus may fail DFSG #5 and #6. I currently see an
acceptable argument being made for the Apache form of the reciprocity
clause (claims restricted to the work itself) to be free[3], but I
don't beleve the OSL form of this clause is, as it is overbroad.
What are others opinions on this?
First, that any license which says that, as a condition of use, you may not take particular other acts is non-Free. For example, a license which prohibits reverse-engineering is non-Free, as is a license which prohibits use by practicing Scientologists. Similarly, a license which prohibited any involvement in a patent lawsuit would be non-Free --- no patent lawyer could use the software. A license which prohibited registering software patents would be non-Free. A license which prohibited any copyright infringement suit against any author of the work would be non-Free.
Second, the above argument extends to licenses which do not impose a condition of use, but instead are revoked when particular actions are taken.
I'd be interested to see where on the slope above others begin to disagree. If these patent-termination clauses are Free, are copyright-termination?
An interesting correllary, which thankfully hasn't appeared, is the presence of copyright reciprocity clauses. I would imagine a reasonable debian policy on reciprocity clauses like the above would apply equally well to copyright reciprocity as it would to patent reciprocity.
On that point I strongly agree: all restrictions on freedom should be treated the same. Software Patents are terrible policy and should be fought... elsewhere. Here, the only concerns should be Free Software and its users.
Would the following be considered Free by anybody here?
If You institute litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory copyright infringement, then any licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as
of the date such litigation is filed.
I hope not.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/