Dear Martin and Others:
I dislike the notion of software patents just as much as you do,
perhaps even more as they have been causing me a lot of grief with
respect to JasPer. I am very much in favor of software with no usage
restrictions at all. In an ideal world, JasPer would have no usage
restrictions imposed by its license. What I ask is that you please
appreciate the world is far from ideal. I have received a number of
rather unkind e-mail from some members of the open-source community.
That is, a number of people have been very critical of me for
the compliant-usage clause in the JasPer license. In this regard, I wish
that people would make a genuine attempt to understand the issues
involved before they attack me for being an unfair/unkind person.
First of all, I am not the sole owner of the JasPer software. I am
only a partial copyright holder along with the other JasPer
Contributors. More specifically, JasPer is co-owned by the following
parties:
1) Image Power, Inc.
2) University of British Columbia
3) Michael Adams
As a result, the terms of the JasPer license cannot be dictated by me alone.
The license and any revisions must be made with the approval of all of
the above parties. Consequently, I was only able to provide input to
the license drafting process, but I could not dictate the terms of the
license myself.
Second, and more importantly, there is a critical legal issue involved
here. In fact, it is for this reason that all of the JasPer
Contributors agreed that the compliant-usage clause was necessary. The
troublesome issue is this: The JasPer Contributors might be held
liable for the patent-infringing use of the JasPer software by
*others*. This is a very serious concern. This is, in fact, the
primary reason why the license imposes the compliant-usage restriction.
That is, this clause in the license serves to protect the JasPer
Contributors (e.g., from lawsuits claiming contributory infringement or
something similar).
Sincerely,
Michael Adams
---
Michael Adams, Assistant Professor
Dept. of Elec. and Comp. Engineering, University of Victoria
P.O. Box 3055 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P6, CANADA
Tel: +1 250 721 6025, Fax: +1 250 721 6052, Office: EOW 403
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Web: www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams
