LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 14:05:42 +0930

Re: Re: bsd- easier than you think

Mark,

The licensing issues seem to be mostly about:

-	How do you stop other people from selling your software?
-	How do force other people to use the same licence for
	all derived or combined software?
-	How do you ensure that you get artistic credit for work?

...and so forth.

But it seems to me that there is a vastly more scary issue that few
people are taking seriously enough. That's the issue of patents - the
monopoly of _ideas_ as opposed to implementations. 

Question:
Which kind of licence would you choose if your prime motivation was
to ensure that no one will sue the author if it turns out later that
the original software of the author contains an idea that someone else "owns"?

Examples would be writing software according to the IETF RFCs and finding
later than various companies "own" the ideas in them and want to charge
royalties for those ideas; and another example is writing an open source
substitute for a commercial program which contains "owned" ideas which are
registered as patents. (Past examples would be RSA and GIF implementations.)

To the best of your knowledge, is it the end user of the software who
has to pay the royalties? Or does the author of the software get hit?

A related example is the horrible DMCA-type legislation which puts
people in prison for writing software which bypasses weak encryption.
In that case, it looks like the author goes to prison.

In my opinion, it's a very scary thought that anyone who writes an
implementation of an RFC could be hauled before the courts and asked
to pay royalties for software that they earn no income from.
It's bad enough having to work for nothing, but to have to pay heavily for
the right to work for nothing seems a bit over the top.

My suspicion is that free software will eventually be killed off by
patents rather than copyright law and licences.

CHeers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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