On 2003-12-16 19:37:28 +0000 Michael Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What I ask is that you please
appreciate the world is far from ideal.
I can appreciate that, but can you please appreciate that your
software licence is far from ideal?
I have received a number of
rather unkind e-mail from some members of the open-source community.
Please name them. I have not been following this very closely and
looking at the bug history didn't show any sign of it. Perhaps they
are unrelated to Debian? If so, I assume you were just noting it and
I'm sorry that you've had problems. Maybe your pseudo-free software
licence raises false hopes in some. The JasPer page seems to claim
that producing a free software and open source is your aim, so I can
understand why that might happen.
As a result, the terms of the JasPer license cannot be dictated by me
alone.
If you are a copyright holder, you seem to have a strong negotiating
position. You can stop JasPer being distributed at all if you get
undesirable terms, can't you?
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.
Is there case history of this? I mean, I might be held liable for some
terrorist attack on London, but it seems unlikely. Few others feel it
necessary to go as far as you have with a patent self-defence clause,
so it would be interesting to learn more about the reasoning.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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