Re: Open Software License v2.1
On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 01:12:06PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> But that's where patents differ from copyright -- they have no concept
> of derivative works, only of protected methods. So if you sue
> claiming that the implementation in Charlie's is bad, you're also
> claiming the implementation in Alice's is bad. This is suing "the
> Licensor or any licensee" over that implementation. The suit is
> *motivated* by failure to comply with the license, but it's over
> patent infringement in Alice or Bob's code.
In the patent case, this seems something like reasonable. If A creates
a work (that, unknown to him, violates a patent); B creates a minor derivative
work (that also violates the same patent), and C sues B for violating
it, he's attempting to prevent both A and B from being distributed, and
it seems close to reasonable that he lose his license to both A and B.
If this wasn't the case, these clauses would be very weak. Suppose that B
was in much wider use than A, but A contains most of the work (for example,
B is a Debian package with a couple security fixes). C would be free to
sue the users of B, without losing his license to A.
It does lead to more serious situations. For example, X writes a program
and reuses several distinct blocks of code that have been made publically
available under this license (say, "MD5.c" and "RSA.c"). A finds out that
he has a patent he can claim applies to MD5, and sues X. Which licenses
does he lose?
Obviously, he loses the license to X's program. Losing his license to MD5.c
in all programs that use it would make sense; he's trying to stifle all
use of it in every free program. However, if he loses his license to MD5.c,
he'd presumably also globally lose his license to RSA.c--and that's not
reasonable at all.
> > Take a simpler case. Alice writes a program. Bill contributes
> > somewhat to it--enough to have a copyright claim. John takes the
> > result, and violates the license. Bill sues John for violating
> > his part of the copyright. Does Bill lose his license to Alice's
> > work? No; he's not saying that Alice's work is in violation,
> > he's saying that John is in violation (through his act of distributing
> > without eg. offering source).
>
> But you can't sue for license violation, not of a free license -- all
> you can do is sue for patent infringement. So he does, in the patent
> case, have to claim infringement of his patent on that method.
Huh? Of course you can sue for license violation of a free license;
for example, for refusing to comply with the source requirements of the
GPL.
(The example was in the context of copyrights and copyright-reciprocity
only.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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