David Picón Álvarez wrote: > From: "Alex Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> It doesn't seem to make any argument why sub-licensing would be >> desirable and/or necessary for free software. >> > > Interesting, for some reason I was under the impression that sublicencing > was part of the essential legal machinery of free software, it turns out the > GPL 3 for instance does not use sublicencing but conveying gives a licence > from the upstream creator of the work. >
GPLv2 worked in the same way too I think (though not worded as explicitly as it is in v3). In general, I tend to think of sublicensing as being very rare - you only really need it if you're changing the license (or, at least, varying it somehow). > Well, in theory the whole point of IPR is that those things which are not > valuable (common knowledge, lacking a creative input (in copyrights) or an > inventive step (patents) are in the public domain. Those things which cost > money/labour to create/invent are privatized in the hope this incentivises > people to invest that labour or money. If you can get the returns of that > privatization without making the investment, that's a failure mode of the > system, no? > I wouldn't say so, in the same way that not getting any returns by making that same investment also isn't a failure mode of the system either. It's a system of risk. > Maybe worse is better is an acceptable strategy here. As in, maybe after > things become so legally dangerous because thousands of SMEs have all kinds > of patents, the big companies would think twice. > Potentially, but I think it probably makes things worse. The problem SMEs have isn't that they can't acquire patents, it's that they can't litigate them effectively against competitors. They would be well-placed to wave them against free software though. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion