Scripsit Brian Thomas Sniffen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > PS You know, I just thought of something. If these clauses cancelled > the copyright license to *everybody* as soon as *anybody* *wins* a > patent lawsuit over the software, I wouldn't mind them so much.
That would spectacularly fail the tentacles-of-evil test. If the author, Foobar Ltd. happens to be acquired by Evil Megacorp, E.M. could have one of their other subsidiaries sue Foobar for with a claim that their xor-cursor patent is violated, and deliberately let Foobar put up no competent defense at all in court. Poof, everybody's copyright license is gone. > It's the cancellation of the license for even seeking impartial > justice that bothers me. The situation the clause aims at is one where a patent owner seeks to gain a monopoly on the original author's work by preventing everybody else - including the original author himself - from using it. I don't think "justice", impartial or not, has anything to do with that. My intuition is that it is fair for free software to say, "if you want to have a monopoly on implementations of your patented gadget, you have to write the code yourself". -- Henning Makholm "In my opinion, this child don't need to have his head shrunk at all."