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? Because anti-software-patent political
statements are passe? Because software patents have not proved to be
the threat to software freedom imagined in a bygone era? Because
licenses produced in that bygone era were not immediately switched to
by all projects? Something else?
On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv(a)mozilla.org> wrote:
On 22/02/13 19:50, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> The obvious way to deal with relicensing is to expand "this License" in
>
>> 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.
Oh. Well, scratch "obvious". It'd be humorous in some way for GPL
relicensing to be a means to antipatentwash copyleft-next works.
> hurdles to join. To extent copyleft-next successfully implements
idea
> and is adopted, or other free software licenses copy implementation,
> free software developers would gain some incremental protection, at
> least a bit more than they're getting now with effective "pool"
> limited to particular works.
We might want to allow other licenses to join the same "protection
pool", perhaps by giving the pool a name that could be referenced.
That sounds interesting.
> 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?
Not to my knowledge, but my knowledge is far from complete.
I'm not sure what if anything to make of it, but that also seems interesting.
Mike