On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 02:09:18PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: > Respectively: the freedom to prosecute with and defend yourself > against patent accusations; the freedom to bear arms; and the freedom > to use nuclear technology. Of course, not all jurisdictions allow > those freedoms, but that's determined by laws, not by copyright > licences.
And again, I don't believe "the freedom to prosecute with patent accusations" is an important "freedom" to protect, any more than "freedom to take my software proprietary". I think it's valid and legitimate for a free license to restrict this "freedom". I do think that "the freedom to defend yourself against patent accusations with patent accusations" is (unfortunately) important, and that licenses doing the above shouldn't overstep and prevent it. I could accept the conclusion "restricting freedom to prosecute with patent accusations is acceptable in and of itself, but side-effects restricting patent defense are unavoidable, rendering all known implementations of this non-free in practice", or alternatively "... but all known implementations have possible abuses", but we're not quite there yet. > Mainly because most possible uses have unpleasant side-effects in some > cases. "Software hoarding" is a description of a copyright-based > problem, if you are referring to rms's "Why Software Should Be Free". > It seems just to use copyright to solve it. Why should we use > copyright against patent law, instead of encouraging patent-afflicted > developers to find ways to use patenting against itself? People taking your work, enhancing it, and distributing binaries without source, is not a copyright-based problem at all, but it's still dealt with via copyright. Perhaps it would be nice and poetically just if patents could be turned against patents in a way that was practical for free software; but that doesn't convince me that using copyright against patents is inherently wrong. -- Glenn Maynard
