On Sat, 2003-11-15 at 11:24, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: > The patent prevents you from solving the covered problem, no matter > how you come to that solution. So the unlawfullness of integrating > the patented method into the parsing of your favorite text editor has > nothing to do with the web server. Saying that the webserver's code > is thus unfree -- attributing the unlawfulness to the method by which > you became aware of the unlawful option -- seems wrong to me.
I disagree, depending on circumstances. For example, when the LZW
patents were still valid, I could not (legally) modify Gimp to produce
normal GIFs. That didn't make Gimp non-free, it made the US and various
other countries non-free.
However, if, for example, a company releases under the MIT X11 license a
program that does A, but also patents doing A --- and enforces that
patent --- then A is not free software. If they grant a limitless
license to the patent, it becomes free again.
I think you must look at the entire picture --- not just the copyright
one --- to determine if software is free. I don't think its free if the
copyright holder decides to use patents, instead of copyright, to limit
your freedoms. In short:
* If party A releases software, and in some maner prevents you
from excercising your DFSG-freedoms, then that software is not
DFSG-free. It doesn't matter if that manner is copyright,
patent, or the mafia.
* If party A releases software, and allows you all your
DFSG-freedoms but an unrelated party B does not allow you to
modify it to, e.g., play DVDs, party A's software is still free.
To put it yet another way, you can't use patents as an end-run around
freeness.
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