> Again, you're subscribing to the world-view that the loss of an ability > for a patent-holder to enforce their patent is unquestionably a good > thing, in all circumstances.
Not so. I regard any attempt to shut down or hamper an open source software project by enforcing a patent against it as a bad thing, and so would view anything that would prevent that as a good thing. Hence my advocacy of some kind of mutual defence for OSS. However I do not hold the view that patents are generally bad. In fact I think that most of the time, on balance, the patent system benefits humanity. Software patents are less defensible, but I think that commercial software vendors are capable of looking after themselves. Therefore I want to see some kind of mutual defence against patent lawsuits within the open source community. I certainly do not want to see anything that would hamper a patent holder's ability to enforce their patent against the rest of the world. Open source developers are a community that extends beyond individual projects. You might say that the Apache project has no business helping other OSS projects to defend themselves against patent lawsuits, and that is entirely your perogative. But I must respectfully disagree. Paul.
