Re: [Freeswitch-users] MPL and licensing

2009-06-20 Thread David Sugar
There are no legal uncertainties with respect to patents in GPL v3.  You
cannot assert them in code you license under it.  There was ambiguities
in GPL v2 in this respect which some companies liked.  I prefer to deal
with honest companies rather than those that are anti-social or might
choose legal ambush later, so any that feel they cannot accept the
greater legal certainty of GPL v3 in this respect are probably companies
that I would not choose to have any kind of relationship with anyway ;).

I recall there were other technical reasons why some have preferred the
MPL, especially over the language of the Lesser GNU General Public
License prior to v3.  I remember having a lovely discussion about this
with Craig Southern a few years back who conceeded that if the language
(of the older LGPL) had been corrected for C++ use cases and object
oriented practices (inlines, templates, derived classes, etc, all were
problems...), he would likely have used it at the time instead of the
MPL for OpenH323.

Steve Underwood wrote:
 paul.degt wrote:
 Yes, that's one of the reasons. Another point is that GPL v.3 is defined 
 more clearly from legal perspective, at least from our legal adviser 
 point of view.
   
 While the legal status of MPL is widely considered to be vague, is GPL 3 
 any better? GPL 2 is pretty sound, and has stood the test of time. 
 However a number of large companies have banned their employees from 
 working on anything involving GPL 3 code, because of legal 
 uncertainties, especially with regard to patents.
 
 Steve
 
 
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Re: [Freeswitch-users] MPL and licensing

2009-06-20 Thread Steve Underwood
David Sugar wrote:
 There are no legal uncertainties with respect to patents in GPL v3.  You
 cannot assert them in code you license under it.  There was ambiguities
 in GPL v2 in this respect which some companies liked.  I prefer to deal
 with honest companies rather than those that are anti-social or might
 choose legal ambush later, so any that feel they cannot accept the
 greater legal certainty of GPL v3 in this respect are probably companies
 that I would not choose to have any kind of relationship with anyway ;).
   
If that is true, why are there some notes on the FSF web site trying to 
clarify what is not well stated about patents in GPL3 itself? You are 
fooling yourself if you think lawyers are generally comfortable with 
GPL3. I'm talking about lawyers who were perfectly happy with GPL2.

I know of some cases where large companies have paid outsourced 
developers to contribute to open source projects, specifically so there 
are no possible legal ramifications related to their own patent 
portfolio. That's a really messed up licence.

Steve


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