John, Ken, The vegetarian clause was, like moose excrement and chicken dancing, purely used to illustrate a point. It is not at all unreasonable to include a clause restricting patents on use of the code and I would expect a judge to respect the licensees intention.
I do believe a clause can apply retroactively. If not, I could download the Linux kernel with good intentions, wait a week and then turn evil and, with that copy, violate GPL exactly as I pleased. License obligations are agreed when making the copy but they do not fade with time. A copyright license essentially says "I will not sue you for copying my stuff provided that you do X and do not do Y". I am interested in three things here: - will the license clause proposed have the desired anti-patent effect? That is, will corporations understand it and respect it? - are there any loopholes, especially with regard to derived works? - is this a true open source license and is it ready for the License Review mailing list? _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss