[copyleft-next] copyleft-next patent commons?

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Sat Feb 23 15:15:40 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Ben Cotton <bcotton at funnelfiasco.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Pamela Chestek <pchestek at 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/attachments/20130223/24ed0ac3/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the copyleft-next mailing list