Thomas Hood wrote: > 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. Consider the case of work W produced by A, licensed with a narrow patent-termination clause (terminates on claims that W infringes patents).
Normally L can sue A for patent infringement. However, if L accepts work W... then L can still sue A for patent infringement related to anything else. If L sues claiming that W infringes her patents, then L loses her license to W. (But would L really want to use W, a work which that irresponsible A made in violation of her patents?) > The restrictions in the GPL are of a different kind. They limit what the > licensee can do _with_the_program_. Again, the narrow restrction is a restriction on what the licensee can do _with_the_program_. (Viz., the licensee cannot attack the program's freeness by claiming in a court that it infringes patents.) Had she not received the program, I suppose she could have sued over it -- but how could she have known that it infringed her patents? > (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. Certainly. :-) -- This space intentionally left blank.
