Messages in this thread |  | | From | "Adam J. Richter" <> | Date | Tue, 28 May 2002 20:21:02 -0700 | Subject | Re: business models [was patent stuff] |
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Alan Cox wrote: >On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 18:13, Adam J. Richter wrote: >> You could license all programs that consist entirely of >> free software. That way, BSD, LGPL, and MPL software that did >> not link in proprietary software would be allowed too, but your >> example of a proprietary program that linked in the BSD'ed >> libpatent.o/c would not be covered by this permission. > >Define "free software" using only legally defined phrases which have >precedent. In fact put four people in a room and get them to define free >software.
Many if not all legal documents contain more than "only legally defined phrases which have precedent." I'm sure Red Hat has signed many. You can reasonably find a definition that covers 99% of what people consider free software and make subsequent grants later. In the other direction, if you accidentally include some less than free software, that should not matter much if you are only taking out these patents for "defensive" purposes.
Example definitions might be: "public domain or any license certified by the Open Software Initiative", "a license that has no more restrictions than version 2 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation ("or any subsequent version"?)." You could also cut and paste from OSI or Debian bullet items.
More importantly, licensing patents only for pure GPL'ed use is unlikely to become a norm that you can expect broad adoption of in free software businesses, as many of them tend to be proponents of slightly different copying permissions. If we have a bunch of patents licensed for GPL-only, another bunch for MPL-only, another bunch for pure-BSD only, then the patent proliferation that I described yesterday will still probably occur.
You have a fleeting opportunity to possibly head most of this off, but you have to look beyond just your favorite license. Many developers and even companies' managements identify strongly with their favorite licenses, and feel personally about their ability to develop free software under those licenses. If the GPL developers don't shield the Apache developers, the X developers, the BSD developers, and the MPL developers so that their ability to continue with the free software portion of their activities has been respected, do you really think they'll shield GPL development from their patents?
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035 +1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America "Free Software For The Rest Of Us." - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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