On 08/01/2012 11:10 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
Now that we're all agreed on the basics of the patent protection issues you can focus on your level of copyleft.
Not sure I agree on that. I see plenty of contemporary interest in use of licenses without explicit patent provisions of any sort (the MIT license seems at least as popular as it ever was). I would even say that the continued interest in GPLv2 even for post-2007 projects shows that explicit patent protection is not the highest priority for many developers, even those who generally favor GPL-style licensing.
As for licenses with explicit patent provisions, I don't think they reveal collectively any common agreement on what patent protection in a FLOSS license ought to be (even at a minimum - except that perhaps the Apache License 2.0 represents the acceptable minimum today.
- I think this is a very good thing - the convergence is the result
of experiments by one license being accepted by others (e.g., MPL's defensive patent clause; GPL's termination/restoration clause, etc.). It may make sense to accept copyleft.next changes that would break the weak ordering we currently have only if they are an experiment that would stand a reasonable chance of being adopted by MPL 3, GPL 4, etc.
Here of course I must disagree, and raise an issue you've given me an opportunity to raise, which is the great danger we are facing as a result of entrenched political 'winners' having effective control over the future of FLOSS licensing. This was an aspect of my concern about the abandoned effort to get OSI approval for CC0, although I don't think I was the one to state it so explicitly. To put it another way, we are entering an era where experimentation in licensing seems to be actively discouraged for what appear to be political reasons rather than reasons grounded in principle. Zooko's TGPPL, discussed earlier on this list, was an earlier casualty of this development.
- Richard