Re: Patent clauses in licenses
Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 12:04:00AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> RMS has in the past claimed that failure to abide by the terms of the
>> GPL results in a permanent loss of those rights (in respect to a
>> specific piece of software, at least). If you're going to disagree with
>> the copyright holder of what is probably still the largest single body
>> of GPLed software in Debian at present, I'm going to want evidence of a
>> decent legal standpoint for this opinion.
>
> RMS has in the past claimed that this has happened to various
> groups. RMS has been ignored. RMS has not pursued the matter, so one
> presumes the FSF counsel have indicated that he can't.
So your belief that the GPL is free is entirely based on a belief that
RMS is wrong, and your belief that RMS is wrong is based on an absence
of something happening?
>> If you want to claim that the only restrictions on freedom we currently
>> accept are those that are entirely controlled under copyright law, you
>> may be correct (the Apache License 2.0 is an obvious counter-example,
>> but you could always claim that that's counter to normal policy and
>> thus some sort of error).
>
> The clause you are referring to in the Apache License 2.0 has no
> effect on software without patents, due in large part to the efforts
> of -legal. It's probably non-free when applied to software with
> patents and enforced. This isn't particularly surprising; "software
> patents are non-free" is more or less a given.
Enforced against whom?
>> We don't accept restrictions as free because they use one branch of the
>> law - we accept restrictions as free because they are either unimportant
>> or because they protect free software more than they hinder it.=20
>
> This indicates that a proprietary license is free if the software is
> useful enough. Therefore it's wrong.
I'm sorry, I honestly don't see how you get to that conclusion.
> We don't accept restrictions because they protect free software more
> than they hinder it. We accept restrictions because they do not
> appreciably hinder it. There is no excuse for significant
> restrictions, nor has one ever been excused.
The GPL's incompatibility with various other licenses hinders free
software. We don't consider that to be a problem because we believe that
the right to receive GPLed code with no further restrictions is more
important than the right to, say, produce a derived work of GPLed code
and OpenSSL. My suspicion is that if we were writing the DFSG today
rather than in 1997, we wouldn't have any significant qualms about
accepting licenses which restricted your ability to use software patents
against the developers.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.project@srcf.ucam.org
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