On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 08:14:40PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > Furthermore, if you *sue claiming that the work infringes your patent*, > I see absolutely no reason why you should have any rights to the work, > since you are trying to eliminate the rights of others to the work. I > can understand the objection to terminating the license over unrelated > lawsuits, but not the objection to termination when you actually sue > over the software in question. > The alternative would be that *no one > except you* would have rights to the software, which means you have now > essentially made it your own proprietary software. That's a false dilemma; the alternative which will normally occur is that the software gets the offending feature removed. Patent lawsuits do not have to be maximally destructive, and your argument only holds if they are. This sort of clause says that you can ignore anybody else's patents and implement anything you wish, and ignore the patents because invoking them will wreck everybody. I can't see how this could possibly be free, even if it might be desireable; for it to be free, it would have to still be free after s/patent/copyright/g (it would still be desireable). I can see a company like SCO adopting a scorched-earth strategy to eliminate some project that their sponsors don't like. So it's failed on both counts: non-free *and* still vulnerable to patent assaults. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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