On 30/10/14 03:18, Riley Baird wrote: > This is the part which worries me: > > no license is granted under Facebookâs rights in any patent claims that > are infringed by (i) modifications to the Software made by you or a > third party, or (ii) the Software in combination with any software or > other technology provided by you or a third party.
Suppose Facebook has two patents - one for a method for frobnicating widgets, and one for a method for reticulating splines, say - and osquery frobnicates widgets in a way that would be covered by that patent, but does not currently reticulate splines. Then this patent grant lets osquery users frobnicate widgets, and the goal of this clause seems to be that if I modify osquery to add unrelated spline-reticulation functionality, Facebook can still demand that I license their spline-reticulation patent separately. I am deliberately using hypothetical patent examples because I don't know, or want to know[1], what patents Facebook holds. The closest copyright equivalent would be that they release one work under a DFSG license, but keep another work proprietary. Obviously, we'd prefer that they license all their patents permissively, and all their copyright works under DFSG licenses; but if they're not going to do that, which in practice they probably won't, a limited license is better than no license. As long as software patents exist, certain specific modifications to software are never going to be possible to do without infringing a patent, regardless of the licensing status of the software you started from. We don't stop considering Linux to be DFSG-licensed just because, for instance, one example of a modification that could be made to Linux would be to add exFAT support using the methods described in certain Microsoft patents, and that would (probably[2]) infringe those patents. If we *did* let that prevent us from distributing or modifying software, then there would be no software that we would consider to be DFSG, and we wouldn't be able to produce a software distribution at all. The fact that we continue to develop Debian rather than just giving up suggests that that is not how we interpret the DFSG. More generally, because independent reinvention without knowledge of the patent can infringe patents, and patent searches for arbitrary free software are neither feasible nor advisable[1], it is always the case that any modification you make to any piece of software might be infringing some previously unknown patent. There's nothing we can do about that, other than trying to get the relevant laws changed. S [1] https://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq, under the heading "Are you suggesting that it is better for developers and contributors not to read patents?" [2] if we assume those patents are valid, which I am neither qualified to assess, nor interested in assessing[1] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/54520947.1070...@debian.org