Re: Choice of venue, was: GUADEC report

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Josh Triplett wrote:

>We do not wish for our user's freedoms to be revokable, and we do not
>accept licenses that allow anyone to do so.  However, *no matter what
>the Free Software license says*, a third-party patent holder can always
>sweep in and use their patents to prevent distribution.  This is an
>inherent problem with software patents, not specific to the software in
>question.  This does *not* mean that we should allow software licenses
>that can be explicitly revoked for no reason, just because patents are
>so fundamentaly wrong.

So we protect our users from suddenly finding that they have no license
to distribute the code, except that, uh, they may suddenly find that
they have no license to distribute the code anyway.

I'd rather go with a similar policy to where we stand with patents. If a
license termination clause isn't being actively enforced, and there's no
good reason to suspect that it will be in future, we should accept it as
free.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org