Re: Patent clauses in licenses
On 2004-09-14 19:32:58 +0100 Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> wrote:
Both groups list significant numbers licenses as free that terminate
on patent litigation: [...]
The OSI lists no licences as "free".
From the FSF's commentary on the Academic Free License at
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html:
Another incompatibility comes from its "Mutual termination for
Patent Action" clause. Putting aside the difficult question of
whether this sort of clause is a good idea or a bad one, it is
incompatible with the GPL.
I'm not convinced that they would consider it the same if the licensed
work is patent-afflicted.
And on Apache Software License 2.0:
We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad
idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.
The Apache v2.0 is a rather narrower termination than most of the
others you cite, which I think is probably free.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
http://www.thewalks.co.uk stand 13,Lynn Carnival,12 Sep
Reply to: