Re: Patent clauses in licenses
* Glenn Maynard:
> I don't believe that enforcing software patents is a legitimate "legal
> right" that needs to be protected.
There is no such thing, "software patents" is misleading. We are
concerned with patents that can be infringed by software, not patents
on software. A lot of the patents that affect Debian in practice are
not software patents, as software implementations became feasible only
long after the patent was filed.
This makes the situation even more complicated because a license
cannot distinguish between "software patents" (evil) and "non-software
patents" (perhaps less evil, but I'm not sure).
If Debian decided that enforcing (any kind of) patents is not a right
of our users we wish to protect, we could come up with criteria that
copyright clauses dealing with patents have to meet. However, if
there is no consensus that patents in general are evil, we won't be
able to reach a consistent position (apart from forbidding such
clauses, including the anti-patent clause in the GPL).
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