Re: Patent clauses in licenses
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:30:13 +0200, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> I don't believe that enforcing software patents is a legitimate "legal
> right" that needs to be protected.
It is fine that you think that people who sue for patent infringement are
naughty, but it is also irrelevant. Debian is not in the business of
imposing ethical behavior on its users.
To be consistent with its principles, Debian should not be distributing
software whose license requires the user to give up rights that she would
have had, had she not accepted the software from Debian. If someone L
would normally have the right to sue someone else A then we should not put
L in the position where she might discover, to her surprise and dismay,
that she can't sue A after all because she makes use of software that
Debian provided to her that originally came from A.
The restrictions in the GPL are of a different kind. They limit what the
licensee can do _with_the_program_. (Viz., the licensee cannot
redistribute the program without providing source code, etc.) These are
not restrictions on what the licensee could have done had she not received
the program. We have to keep this distinction in mind, I think.
--
Thomas Hood
Reply to: