Michael, On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 11:37:28AM -0800, Michael Adams wrote: > I dislike the notion of software patents just as much as you do, > perhaps even more as they have been causing me a lot of grief with > respect to JasPer. I am very much in favor of software with no usage > restrictions at all. In an ideal world, JasPer would have no usage > restrictions imposed by its license. What I ask is that you please > appreciate the world is far from ideal. I have received a number of > rather unkind e-mail from some members of the open-source community. > That is, a number of people have been very critical of me for > the compliant-usage clause in the JasPer license. In this regard, I wish > that people would make a genuine attempt to understand the issues > involved before they attack me for being an unfair/unkind person. I hope that no one making such an assertion has claimed to be speaking on behalf of Debian. Naturally, as members of a project dedicated to the creation of a wholly Free operating system, we have a certain preference for software that meets our Free Software Guidelines, but there should be no stigma attached to software that is not free -- and certainly no hostility directed at its authors (at least, not for this reason alone ;). That said, I think my previous analysis of the JasPer license (as found at http://bugs.debian.org/181969, the bug report referenced in the subject line) speaks for itself. You must by all means license your own software under terms that you (with the other copyright holders) find acceptable; and we, the Debian project, must follow our own guidelines when deciding whether a given piece of software can be included in our distribution. Those guidelines hold that usage restrictions are not acceptable, regardless of the integrity and good intentions of the copyright holder. > Second, and more importantly, there is a critical legal issue involved > here. In fact, it is for this reason that all of the JasPer > Contributors agreed that the compliant-usage clause was necessary. The > troublesome issue is this: The JasPer Contributors might be held > liable for the patent-infringing use of the JasPer software by > *others*. This is a very serious concern. This is, in fact, the > primary reason why the license imposes the compliant-usage restriction. > That is, this clause in the license serves to protect the JasPer > Contributors (e.g., from lawsuits claiming contributory infringement or > something similar). I can't agree that this is a "critical legal issue", but as IANAL, that's not really my call to make. I *can* say, though, that we have a large amount of software in our archive written by people who have quite a different assessment of this risk. Regards, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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