On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml(a)gondwanaland.com> wrote:
> That's not quite the same. MPL 1.1 section 8.2 b) provides that you can
> lose rights to use the Modifications of a contributor to an MPLed work
> if you launch patent litigation against them about _anything_.
>
> So if megacorps ABC and DEF were collaborating on project Foo, and a
> random subsidiary of ABC sued another random subsidiary of DEF about a
> patent on the unrelated Bar widget, then ABC would lose their rights to
> DEF's bits of Foo. This causes action-at-a-distance - said warring
> subsidiaries may have no idea what they just did, as their lawsuit had
> nothing to do with the MPL and they may never have heard of it.
I suppose this criticism applies to some extent to any expansion of
pool beyond just copyleft-next works.
If you tied it to software, or OSI-approved licenses- something
broader than copyleft-next but still software - at least some of the
critique would be mitigated. A big part of the concern here is that
the subsidiaries of ABC and DEF are, say, HW manufacturers, and so
their lawyers would have no idea about any software licensing.
Still, I like it. Heck, I like MPL 1.1's approach, which I did
not
fully understand before. Has MPL 1.1 termination ever actually come up
in patent litigation?
No.
Luis (who has been a little busy, sorry for absence from the list)