Andrew Suffield wrote: > Terminating licenses (copyright, patent, trademark, dog-humping, or > whatever else might interfere with distribution/modification/use) for > any reason other than non-compliance is a bit of legal insanity to get > contract-like provisions into a license. These provisions have to be > considered like any other restriction (invert the sense of the > conditional to get the restriction).
In this case, however, I would make the case that by suing claiming that the Work is infringing a patent, the person suing is not complying with the spirit of the license. The person suing is certainly attempting to claim that the license is not really valid for anyone *else*, and if it's not valid for anyone else, why should it be valid for the lawsuit initiator? > Anything that requires a contract-like construct, rather than a simple > license, is probably non-free. "Probably" is a key word here. I understand your position though; it has sense to it too. I do think this sort of clause is unnecessary in a copyleft license with explicit patent grants, like the OSL, because that already prevents the "patent holder steals the work" scenario. -- This space intentionally left blank.
