Re: IBM Public License (again)
On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 10:30:03AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-05-13 02:53:33 +0100 Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> >MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> >>To me, it seems clearly non-free because it terminates if there is
> >>legal action against IBM about patents "applicable to" some other
> >>software. [...]
> >
> >It only terminates a patent license, not a copyright license. That
> >just makes the license effectively mute about patents (which is true
> >of most licenses we look at). Patents were also discussed for an
> >Intel license [1].
>
> This seems rather worse than being mute about patents, putting IBM in
> a position of strength if software patents are involved.
[...]
>
> Are there patents on the covered work? I guess that is the determining
> factor, as otherwise the patent licence seems irrelevant. Why include
> it if there are no patents, though?
In my case it is a rather trivial Perl module (I18N::AcceptLanguage), to
write it was probably less time consuming than this discussion. Perhaps
I could ask the author why he uses such a complicated license for such
a trvial piece of software.
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
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