On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 02:42:24AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 06:49:54PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > If you're claiming "you don't get to exercise your right to argue > > about jurisdiction" is equivalent to "you must pet a cat", then, IMO, > > you need to argue the same thing about "you don't get to exercise your > > patent rights". > You're aware that most of the people arguing that choice of venue clauses > are non-free also hold the opinion that patent non-enforcement as a > condition of the copyright license is also non-free? No, not at all. It's been years since I've followed -legal, and I certainly don't keep track of who thinks what. I fundamentally don't think it *matters* what individual subscribers to -legal think. What I care about is having a reasonable, widely understood definition of free software that meshes with the rest of the free software and open source community, that Debian can use to work out what software we'll distribute in main. I don't think it's remotely obvious that the DFSG rules out all patent non-enforcement clauses, I'm pretty sure it's not remotely obvious that the DFSG rules out choice of venue clauses, and so far I haven't seen any real reason why Debian needs to rule out those clauses. I can _certainly_ see why those sort of things might be more of a drawback than a benefit and we might want to discourage their use, but we can say "bad" in ways other than "non-free". Cheers, aj, who suspects he's against patent non-enforcement clauses in the past
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