Re: Patent clauses in licenses
Florian Weimer wrote:
> * 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.
Call them "patents on mathematical algorithms" if you like. Traditionally
they were not patentable.
> 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).
I'm not so sure you can't distiguish.
The existing licenses mostly use the horrible phrase "patents applicable to
software", which certainly does not distinguish.
--
This space intentionally left blank.
Reply to: