On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 11:41:31PM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote:
On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 09:17:34PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
Lost attribution, Josh I think
Requiring that distributors of a piece of software refrain from making
accusations of patent infringement regarding the software itself is
consistent with the goal of upholding the freedoms of users over that
software. As such, we consider license condititions acceptable that
terminate a licensee's rights to the software if that licensee raises a
patent lawsuit claiming that the software in question infringes their
patent(s).
I'm not sure I understand where you're at now. Earlier, you seemed to
agree with the kind of restriction that Josh mentioned.
Matthew Garrett's subsequent message pinpoints where I am with this:
terminating patent licenses in response to patent claims is fine, requiring
distributors to allow royalty-free distribution if they're going to engage
in distribution at all (as in the GPL) is fine, but terminating copyright
licenses in response to defense of one's patent rights is not ok.