On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Ben Cotton <bcotton@funnelfiasco.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Pamela Chestek <pchestek@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That strikes me as being somewhat vague.
>
> And that's a bad thing because ...?

It scares people off. First in the way that you describe, which I
agree is a GoodThing[tm]. What I'm concerned about is scaring off
people who are acting in good faith. I would expect (but have no way
to prove) that vague clauses that result in bad things happening are
more likely to prevent someone from adopting a covered work in the
first place than they are to prevent someone who was going to be a bad
actor anyway from acting badly.

The only ones you're scaring off are pro-patent, that is, they want more latitude in throwing their patent weight around and want to be able to threaten patent infringement. Are they going to be adopting a license that has a patent grant in the first place?

I can't think of a situation where a good actor (defined as anti-software patent) would want to retain the ability to assert a patent offensively, but maybe I'm just not thinking of it.

Pam