"Francesco Poli" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:50:12 -0400 Joe Smith wrote:
[...]
I think this stems from source code not requireing a patent license.
So if the source code is available, the patent can be bypassed by
having the consumer
download and compile the code themselves. Of course all of this can
only protrect the downstream
consumer if the compiled binaries are not being passed around.
Hence, with this kind of "protection from patents" we lose the
permission to distribute binaries! It does not look as a good enough
protection, then...
I agree. It does protect the freedom of the end user, but without more
effort on the part of the
licensor, things can be problematic.
I'm not sure about commerical entities compiling from source code and using
the application.
I suspect that sort of use may still need a patent license. Thus we have
effetive discrimination against businesses.
(That discrimination is not part of the licence, but is part of the
source-code only software patent workaround.)
Thus ideally the GPL v3 would not allow public availability of source code
as an option, but require further
protections.
However that could be a problem. There has historicly been a fair amount of
GPLv2 covered code that was distributed
source-only because of patent issues.
On the other hand, most of the time most of the time that happened the party
did not have an actual patent license,
so that clause would not apply to them.
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