Re: No mention of "patents" in DFSG
2007/10/9, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop>:
> If they can be made public safely, I think they would be in the removal
> request bug. The biggest problem is if a patent-aggressor requires
> silence as part of the settlement, saying they'll sue for past crimes
> if it's made public.
In my opinion this is just too absurd to believe, this can't possible
be legally enforcible. Sounds somehow like censorship to me.
> That is unfortunate. Have you tried looking into the famous software
> patents at http://swpat.ffii.org/ for example or are you looking for
> debian package examples in particular?
I am really looking for very detailed and verifiable example cases,
that affected individual packages in the debian repositories.
This could look like the following purely fictious example:
"On 20.02.2002 Company XYZ contacted Person ABC, with the request to
remove packet DEFG, because the software is believed to be affected by
US-Patent-Nr. 0000XXX-00, which is in the posession of our company.
This Patent is valid under the Jurisdiction of the US, Canada and
Europe."
Or an example where someone outside how distributed a certain software
and was sued, which motivated the debian people to remove that
package. This of course would need to be backed by patent-numbers and
information about the legal judgements as well.
Questions:
* WHAT Debian package is affected
* WHAT are the patents that apply
* WHO is enforcing it, and do they target "non-commercial" efforts as well?
* WHO has been sued yet, and for WHAT exactly
> I think maintainers and ftp-masters are responsible for decisions to
> remove; and I think verification is already part of the process, but
> note that a package simply becoming no fun to maintain because of patent
> threats can result in a reason for removal (no maintainer), too.
This is just my opinion, and a respect that people might disagree, but
I don't really like to bow down before threats unless there is
concrete and publicly verifiable and provable information that I am
doing wrongly. I am an enthusiastic Free and Open-Source Software
Person, and I prefer to stand up for what I believe, and I still think
there is a lot of FUD in the perception of patents in FLOSS. I think
in the long term it would be very good to stick to facts like events,
numbers, dates and so on. Fight the FUD with Facts.
Cheers
-Richard
--
Are you teaching the What and the How but without the Why and the When?
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