On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Havoc Pennington wrote: > I think my arguments are compelling. If someone else thinks > differently, they can say so, and explain their reasoning... > > The bottom line is that dbus has an MIT/X11-equivalent license, with > the addition of a *weaker* patent clause than LGPL/GPL already have. > The license was written by a lawyer and is perfectly sane.
"Sane" and "written by a lawyer" are surely orthogonal to desirability from the point of view of free software. Havoc wrote in his blog: "I believe if you distributed D-Bus under GPL or LGPL, you would be making a patent grant of any patents affecting D-Bus. The AFL patent clause does not require you to make a patent grant; it still allows you to sue. You just have to stop distributing D-Bus while you do it. With the GPL or LGPL, you can never distribute in the first place, without giving up the right to sue at all. Unless I'm missing something, there's no way the AFL patent clause can be a problem unless LGPL or GPL would be a problem in the same context." IANAL, but... Hypothesis: Monster Corp distributes D-BUS under AFL, while believing that DB in fact violates patents held by Monster Corp. MC then sues users of DB. MC can no longer distribute DB under AFL, but they don't care! They have succeeded in causing trouble. But as Havoc says, if Monster Corp had distributed DB under *GPL they would have effectively made a patent grant and given up the right to sue, making this scenario impossible. OK, maybe there's no Monster Corp associated with D-BUS right now, but we know there _are_ such monsters around. This seems to me a _major_ reason to see *GPL as superior to AFL from the p.o.v. of free software. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list