On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 08:58:03PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: > I guess I wasn't clear. If the license says that my copyright license will > be terminated if I take any patent action against the licensor and I sue > him for infringing my patent on my three-point hitch stabilizer he will > terminate my license. That's what I mean by hardware patents. Most > patents have nothing to do with computers or software.
I think there's agreement that licenses which terminate due to action unrelated to the software is non-free, such as the RPSL[1]. I don't believe limiting it to software patents is sufficient; at a minimum, it needs to be restricted to only terminate based on patent action claiming that the work itself violates a patent, which is what the OSL 2.1 does[2]. The interesting debates at the moment are whether these narrower clauses are free in principle, and whether the existing clauses have room for abuse (making them non-free in practice). [1] https://helixcommunity.org/content/rpsl [2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.1.php (Not that I'm endorsing this license--I believe it's non-free in a couple other ways.) -- Glenn Maynard
