Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 12:58:39AM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote: >> > In the current patent-litigation context, a large stable of patents to >> > cross-license is considered a vitally important corporate defense >> > strategy. >> >> Yes, but a patent could not be part of such a portfolio if if were >> licensed freely to the general public. > > ... unless it's licensed with a condition that if you sue them, the > patent grant is withdrawn. That seems to be the purpose of the > reciprocity clause. > > It seems the intent is to require a patent license (under 4b), while > still allowing those patents to be used defensively (against other > patents). > > At least on its face, it seems like a useful compromise: companies > often legitimately won't want to give out unrecovable patent licenses, > since they need them to defend against other, hostile patent holders. > > Still undecided. I can sympathise both with attempts to find defenses > against patents (of which free software has scarce few), and to do so in > a way that doesn't force others to weaken their own patent defenses.
My employer just hosted a lawyer to tell us all about the Dangers of F/OSS (Free or Open Source Software). His talk was largely FUD, but one of the few pieces which found purchase with management was Patent Litigation Fear: that if we were using Mozilla (the MPL has a similar clause) anywhere in the company, or even worse had standardized on it, and got into a patent lawsuit with any Mozilla contributor, we could lose our license to use Mozilla, or to distribute code which derived from Mozilla. That's just too scary to risk: if somebody else really does violate one of our (non-software, even) patents, we have no recourse without first switching to some other code base. Yech. That pretty much seems like a usage restriction: it restricts us from doing things in private, based on our attempts to exercise *unrelated* legal rights. -Brian
