Re: Patents again

[telford]

In gnu.misc.discuss Abdullah Ramazanoglu <abdullah@ramazanoglu.tr> wrote:

> I don't believe that there would be genuine good faith towards OSS in the
> commercial world, beyond the front window dressing. As long as they can
> make the community to believe that they're friends (as opposed to allies),
> why should go that extra mile and give up their "ammunition" away? It
> doesn't sound like a good business deal.

It wouldn't happen without considerable public pressure. At the moment
there is a lot of humming and haring without a clear direction so this
sort of collective indecisiveness will not generate the required pressure.

> Well, I guess this leaves non-GPL OSS projects out in the cold, but
> somehow a compromise needs to be done.

I think that the BSD codebase would be OK, probably perl would be OK too.
The details of this proposed GPP would have to be finely tuned so as not
to conflict too many OSS projects -- it would get kind of hard to sell
Linux boxes without X11.

> Anyway, I personally believe that
> it would be better for everybody if number of OSS licenses was reduced,
> and OSS projects clubbed around GPL, which provides the best protection
> for OSS. We might need that level of protection in the apparently hard
> times ahead.

I completely agree on this one, I think that the Creative Commons was a
good idea because by reducing the guts of license-writing down to picking
from a form they avoid the situation where every author has to become
an attorney so they can write a license for their own work. Ultimately,
if we are going to embrace freedom, we do have to accept that a significant
body of people will never use the GPL.

        - Tel