On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 02:09:16PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: > 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). There is no such clause in the GPL. Rather, it has a clause (which is explicitly referred to as "intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License") that says you have to fulfill the terms of the license - which means you have to grant all the required rights to anybody to whom you distribute the software. Coincidentally, if there are patents on the software which you don't control or won't license, then you can't do this. So you can't distribute it. Any copyleft license does this, really. The clause in the GPL is probably a no-op, and only present to underscore the point. This is an example of how to write a free license that defends against software patents. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature