On Sat, Mar 09, 2013 at 11:34:03AM -0800, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> I believe that ambitious
> anti-software-patent provisions in FLOSS licenses, provisions designed
> to realistically shape corporate behavior or else just make a
> political statement, are the product of a now-very-bygone era. But
> maybe I'm wrong.
Why? Because we now know that such provisions cannot realistically
shape corporate behavior?
I don't think we know that. (My guess is that some patent provisions
in FLOSS licenses *do* shape some corporate behavior, but that's an
easy guess to make.)
I am personally skeptical about highly elaborate and complex patent
provisions in FLOSS licenses shaping corporate behavior other than in
encouraging some patent-holding companies to avoid distribution of
software under certain licenses. I consider the current copyleft-next
approach to be non-elaborate in this sense. It does about exactly what
one would expect a present-day copyleft open source (I use that term
deliberately) license to do, nothing more.
Because anti-software-patent political
statements are passe?
That is certainly not true.
Because software patents have not proved to be
the threat to software freedom imagined in a bygone era?
I actually do not believe there is any evidence that software patents
have proved to be a significant threat to software freedom in the
strict sense.
Because
licenses produced in that bygone era were not immediately switched to
by all projects?
I suppose if there had been some mass and lasting switch to A/GPLv3
(the high point of the political phenomenon I am referring to),
including by *noncopyleft* projects, we would be living in a very
different universe, but that goes without saying.
Something else?
It's more intuition, and observations of what I see in the wider
world. Efforts to tackle issues relating to software patents and FLOSS
now seem more likely to take the form of cooperative activities by
patent-holding companies external to the drafting of FLOSS licenses.
>>> b) initiate a patent infringement litigation claim
(excluding
>>> declaratory judgment actions, counterclaims, and cross-claims)
>>> alleging that any work under this License directly or indirectly
>>> infringes any patent.
>>
>> to include any license this license may be relicensed as (so any GPL
>> work),
>
> I expect that would fall foul of the GPL's "no further restrictions"
clause.
This is not obvious to me, but:
Oh. Well, scratch "obvious". It'd be humorous in some
way for GPL
relicensing to be a means to antipatentwash copyleft-next works.
Sure, I mean, there's an interesting theoretical issue (it's a variant
of the 'magical relicensing' problem exposed a while back by Josh Gay)
but the possibility of such antipatentwashing doesn't bother me too
much.
I'm suddenly reminded of a lawyer who told me their client intended to
relicense some LGPL 2.x code to GPLv2 in order to avoid the effect of
the clauses about reverse engineering and so forth.
- RF