On 28.11.2007, at 00:28, Pierre wrote:
One word: transparency.
It is amazing how it helps to discuss things instead of acting like
that.
I find it amazing how oblivious to community concerns this all is.
Anyways, from some other discussions I gathered that the main thing
that is currently being talked about is CLA's. Once they have a CLA
in place they will "open" the discussions. From what I hear at least
part of the previous "secret" discussions will then be opened as well
via some kind of archive.
To me the key piece that would kill the idea of a CLA is if it
required me to be able to grant all patents that may be covering any
of the code I contribute. So far all the CLA's I have read seemed to
imply this. And from my understanding this is what makes the CLA work
for companies. The alternate interpretation [1], that the Apache CLA
and its many derived CLAs, only requires that you grant all patents
that knowingly cover the given code, seems bogus to me, since that
would defeat the purpose of the CLA to begin with. And that is to be
able to deflect all law suits aimed at the project and its users, by
pointing the finger at a single developer. The idea being that single
developers are no interesting targets for patent trolls. I find this
claim, that most OSS projects keep repeating, so hideously evil. If
all you need is to ensure that only single developers are to blame
for patent violations, than the patent system would probably quickly
get an update (because then even our friends at IBM, SUN etc would
start to care - they do like software patents, do not let yourself
get confused by their patent pool schemes).
The point is, there is no guarantee that a patent holder will not
still proceed to sue developer Joe Schmo. Number one, not all of us
stay poor, but more importantly it will just take a few law suits to
teach all the developers in the world that all the guys that gave you
friendly advice on CLA's were either lying or uninformed (or lying
about being informed). However all the Joe Schmo developers that were
taught this lesson can kiss happy life good bye.
Now without CLA's, there would be more incentive for companies like
IBM and SUN to actually take a different approach to software
patents, like using their happy lobby money to actually put an end to
them. Or invalidate the patent claim in question, because otherwise
they can be sued as well for using the given code, since they do not
have a patent grant from Joe Schmo.
I have asked IBM to validate the legal situation with a proper legal
analysis (which I might still get cross checked by a lawyer of my
choice), but I do not know if my contact at IBM was too lazy to
actually ask, or if IBM just chose to not answer because they know
full well that CLAs is essentially using developers as bumpers. And
when the big guys slam into each other .. there is not much left of
the bumpers in between.
regards,
Lukas
[1] http://osdir.com/ml/java.harmony.devel/2006-02/msg00344.html
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