On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 5:14 AM Rick Moen <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, yes, indeed. That's the queasy-making aspect: IMO, it means that > you might reasonably think today that codebase X is legitimately open > source in your legal jurisdiction, but tomorrow someone pulls out a > submarine patent (in your jurisdiction) and issues invoices, and > suddenly codebase X has been rendered proprietary in your jurisdiction > even while it remains open source over the border. Even if this is true (and I don't yet concede it), the lack of a patent release from the software author(s) isn't the biggest threat. Anyone who releases code under an open-source license probably isn't going to turn around and sue you for patent infringement, though it's certainly possible. The deep threat comes from third parties, which is a risk that neither ther the licensor nor the licensee can reasonably mitigate. > All of that is deeply unfortunate, and has the sole advantage of being, > as far I'm aware... er... reality. > Okay, but if we accept that patent infringement makes a piece of software not open source, we are in this position: if someone asks "Is program X open source?" our only replies are "Definitely not" and "Maybe." A classification like that isn't very useful. It's more meaningful IMO to say that such a program *is* open source and accept that not all open-source software is usable everywhere. You're about to get another entry in > http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/sigs-rickmoen.html, I'll have you know. > Feel free to raid my full list at <http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/signatures >. Reading them all at once, however, can cause humor fatigue. (BTW, I've decided to start omitting the "-- " line because so many mail clients, notably Gmail, suppress it and everything after it.) John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan [email protected] Unless it was by accident that I had offended someone, I never apologized. --Quentin Crisp
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