Re: Patent clauses in licenses
* Thomas Hood:
> The point of promoting free software is to allow people to
> use/study/modify/redistribute software in freedom. People can't do these
> things in freedom if they are subjected to unreasonable restrictions in
> the licenses attached to the software.
We already accept various tradeoffs. For example, copyleft licenses
come with severe (to some people) restrictions on modified
redistribution. The "no further restrictions" clause of the GPL
creates significant problems for Debian.
Yet the project still considers the licenses as free. Copyleft tries
to solve the problem of software hoarding, and therefore has to
refrain from granting some freedoms (which a few users/developers
consider important).
> Do you think that it is reasonable to expect the licensee L to give up her
> legal rights with respect to the author A of program P in exchange for
> being allowed to use/study/modify/redistribute program P?
>
> It depends on what the rights in question are, I guess.
>
> At one extreme it would be unreasonable to expect L to give up her legal
> right, e.g., to sue A for damages caused by A's automobile running into
> L's house.
>
> At the other extreme it would be reasonable to expect L to give up her
> legal right to sue A for damages caused by L's use of program P. (I
> assume here that offering programs on an as-is basis is reasonable.)
>
> I don't see how L's right to sue A for patent infringement can possibly
> resemble the second case more than the first, so I am inclined to regard
> the demand that L give up such rights as unreasonable ... until someone
> can give me some suitable reasoning, of course.
Well, if you think that patents are evil and their proliferation has
to be stopped, then things change a bit.
The difficulty with anti-patent clauses in software licenses is that
they have to be rather broad because the effect of patents is not
confined to parties in a contract (unlike software licenses). It's
hard to balance the interests of users and developers, especially if
you acknowledged that some patents and patent suits are legitimate and
should not be discouraged by copyright licenses.
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