On Tuesday 21 December 2004 00:02, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
<snip>
Furthermore, it was explained to me that the patent right disclaimers in the
ASL2.0 can be circumvented in nasty ways by a truly malicious
company/individual if that is the intent, SO the GPL compatibility had higher
value than the patent right issue.
in europe at least, it's very likely that this won't really matter.
by this time next year, software patent violations are most likely to be enforceable by criminal sanction. any company wanted to maliciously damage an open source project would only have to target individual european release managers using the most pliant european legal system (UK law, for example). i don't see any way in which the ASF could act to help release managers faced with the criminal law in europe and (against this particular patent threat) neither the GPL nor the ASL could offer any protection at all. IMO the chilling effect of only one open source release manager facing a long prison sentence together with total sequestration of assets would be tremendous.
happy christmas, one and all!
- robert
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