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Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading meansUnfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading meansPosted Sep 11, 2010 15:30 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544)In reply to: Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means by FlorianMueller Parent article: FSF responds to Oracle v. Google and the threat of software patents
> inalienable author's rights But that's a copyright problem, not a GPL problem. The argument you were making is that the GPL isn't as good as FSF says it is. Inalienable author's rights have never been found to be a problem for free software, and if they are a problem then it's not FSF's fault, and in fact, GPL actually does more to protect software from this problem than most (or all) other free software licences. The GPL's requirement to maintain a changelog has the role of protecting the reputation of the author, which might reduce the risk that an author could try to use those inalienable author's rights to place restrictions on modified versions.
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Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means Posted Sep 11, 2010 15:35 UTC (Sat) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]
I agree it's not a GPL problem. It's an author's rights problem that would affect any license, including proprietary closed-source licenses, just like a GPLv2-style implicit patent grant isn't a unique strength of GPLv2 either.
The only reason I mentioned those limitations is to point out that the goal of granting to licensees all of the rights of the original licensor generally isn't achievable, with respect to different types of IPRs.
Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means Posted Sep 11, 2010 18:08 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
I think the GPLv2's implicit patent grant is specific to the GPL.
It's in sections 6 and 7.
If someone wanted to argue that a BSD licence had an implicit patent grant, then that would be harder to justify. There's nothing at all written, so it really would be down to implications intended by the general act of publishing something as free software. But with GPLv2, the "implicit" grant is written in the licence.
Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means Posted Sep 11, 2010 18:20 UTC (Sat) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]
Those sections don't contain a patent license grant. Section 6 doesn't even mention patents and Section 7 says that distribution of a program under the GPL isn't allowed if there's a problem with third-party patents that can't be resolved in a GPL-compliant way. It's more like the whole thing was written with the idea in mind that someone publishing code under the GPL shouldn't hold patents on such code.
Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means Posted Sep 11, 2010 18:56 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Section 6: "...You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. ..."
I don't see how patents would be excluded from that.
Section 7 might not be useful in the Oracle v. Google case, since there are no third party patents, but it can be useful in other cases since it implies that if you rely on a patent licence, and if you have the authority to pass that licence on to recipients, then you do so. (Otherwise you'd be violating copyright.)
Unfortunately the FSF thinks the GPL end justifies any misleading means Posted Sep 11, 2010 19:04 UTC (Sat) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] Section 6: "...You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. ..." It's a broad statement and not imposing restrictions is not the same as granting a license. By not owning any relevant patents, one can also satisfy the requirement you quoted. Comncerning Section 7, it seems that patent license deals are done by companies using GPLv2 software. If they only use the software themselves (like Amazon and Salesforce), that's no problem, but the likes of HTC redistribute. I'm just describing what's happening; if it were up to me, there wouldn't be any patents of that kind in the first place. So by just looking non-judgmentally at what's going on in the market, it looks like Section 7 is either easily circumvented or toothless...
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