On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 06:02:12AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > Finally, it is totally unacceptable to tie this into a software > copyright license, such that accepting the license affects the status > of your own patents. That's non-free however you look at it.
Your own patents are only affected if you contribute code that uses them. If I distribute modifications to a GPL work, the status of my own copyright is affected, too. Also, note 3B and 3C. Modifications being marked a "contribution", and thus having patent licenses attached, is completely optional. I can't find any requirement in section 7 that all distributed modifications be "contributions". Hmm. It seems that if someone forks Apache, the Apache team could not integrate anything from the fork; if someone uses Apache's code and improves it, they couldn't use it, at least without discussion with copyright holders, since the changes wouldn't be "contributions". I wonder if that's intentional. (Well, there's no real guarantee in in the license that all code in Apache will be "contributions", but that would defeat the point.) > (And this still applies just as much to software licenses. It is > *hard* to gain a copyright license; you have to create the work. The GPL requires that any distributed modifications be freely (according to the GPL) licensed to whoever receives it. I think the general notion here is to have a similar requirement for patents that affect the code. I'm inclined to think of it as "if you contribute code, we want a license to use it under *both* copyright and patent laws, not just copyright". I'm undecided about reciprocity for something we don't require to begin with (patent licenses). -- Glenn Maynard