Re: Patent clauses in licenses
On 2004-09-23 11:46:35 +0100 Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
I suspect there's consensus among the project that "freedom to abuse
patent law" is not a freedom worth protecting. [...]
Again, you reword not combining independent issues into some sort of
protection. You seem to be avoiding my point.
By comparison, how does debian protect the freedom to vote against
software patent supporters in our legislatures? That's clearly an
issue affecting free software, but we don't take specific action to
protect it.
I'm tending to think the implementation problems do exist, though.
Oh well, that's something.
Finally, there seems little need to combine them, so what's the
incentive
driving authors who do?
I think you understand the desire of free software authors to protect
their work against patents in any reasonable way possible.
This all hinges on whether we consider using copyright law against
other law "reasonable" then?
If I take your work, enhance it, give out binaries and refuse to give
out source, it's not the law restricting the work; it's my withholding
of source. [...]
OK, I misunderstood the situation you were constructing. I thought we
were forbidden from decompilation/reverse engineering the binary too.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
LinuxExpo.org.uk village 6+7 Oct http://www.affs.org.uk
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