On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:30:13 +0200, Glenn Maynard wrote: > I don't believe that enforcing software patents is a legitimate "legal > right" that needs to be protected.
It is fine that you think that people who sue for patent infringement are naughty, but it is also irrelevant. Debian is not in the business of imposing ethical behavior on its users. To be consistent with its principles, Debian should not be distributing software whose license requires the user to give up rights that she would have had, had she not accepted the software from Debian. If someone L would normally have the right to sue someone else A then we should not put L in the position where she might discover, to her surprise and dismay, that she can't sue A after all because she makes use of software that Debian provided to her that originally came from A. The restrictions in the GPL are of a different kind. They limit what the licensee can do _with_the_program_. (Viz., the licensee cannot redistribute the program without providing source code, etc.) These are not restrictions on what the licensee could have done had she not received the program. We have to keep this distinction in mind, I think. -- Thomas Hood
