Re: Patent clauses in licenses
On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 08:58:03PM -0500, John Hasler wrote:
> I guess I wasn't clear. If the license says that my copyright license will
> be terminated if I take any patent action against the licensor and I sue
> him for infringing my patent on my three-point hitch stabilizer he will
> terminate my license. That's what I mean by hardware patents. Most
> patents have nothing to do with computers or software.
I think there's agreement that licenses which terminate due to action
unrelated to the software is non-free, such as the RPSL[1].
I don't believe limiting it to software patents is sufficient; at a minimum,
it needs to be restricted to only terminate based on patent action claiming
that the work itself violates a patent, which is what the OSL 2.1 does[2].
The interesting debates at the moment are whether these narrower clauses
are free in principle, and whether the existing clauses have room for
abuse (making them non-free in practice).
[1] https://helixcommunity.org/content/rpsl
[2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.1.php
(Not that I'm endorsing this license--I believe it's non-free in a couple
other ways.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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