Andrew Suffield writes: > Long-standing conclusions, summarised: > > Terminating licenses (copyright, patent, trademark, dog-humping, or > whatever else might interfere with distribution/modification/use) for > any reason other than non-compliance is a bit of legal insanity to get > contract-like provisions into a license. These provisions have to be > considered like any other restriction (invert the sense of the > conditional to get the restriction). > > Anything that requires a contract-like construct, rather than a simple > license, is probably non-free. DFSG-free licenses give things to the > licensee, not to the copyright holder. They are not a trade (although > the grant of permissions does not have to be the most generous > possible), even if their social behaviour resembles one. > > (Corollary of these two: terminating a license for any reason other > than non-compliance is probably non-free)
Other corollary: Claiming something is a "contract-like provision" is a useful wedge to make something like the GPL a non-free license. On the other hand, I always thought free software was about protecting users, not patent litigants who are supposed to already have working forms of the patented invention. > A restriction saying "You may not sue me for patent issues" is > non-free. If any licenses said that, it might be relevant. > Patent licenses are ignored unless there are actively enforced > patents. In almost every case where we come across these patent > clauses, there are no actively enforced patents, so we simply ignore > them - but sometimes people write clauses like this one, which remain > non-free in the absence of patents. If the patent licenses are ignored unless actively enforced, do you have a problem with the Apache License 2.0, in which only the patent license terminates in the event of patent litigation? Michael Poole