Re: Withdrawal of Approval and Second Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns

[Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com>]

On 2007-04-11 10:08, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com> writes:
>
> > Simon,
> >
> > Can you identify any instance of a non-profit GPL implementor or
> > distributor being sued for not having "sent a postcard" for the
> > style of RF license you are objecting to?
>
> Brian, two responses:
>
> 1) You seem to assume that GPL implementers would violate the patent
>    license by redistributing their code without sending a postcard.
>    In order words, your question assumes and implies bad-faith amongst
>    GPL implementers.

Not specifically. My question is a practical one. People who receive
open source code, tweak it, and install it may often be completely
unaware that they should be asking for a license. Do we have any
practical evidence that IPR owners actually care?

>    What typically happens in practice, among good-faith practitioners,
>    is that there won't be any GPL (or Apache, or Mozilla, or ...)
>    implementation of the patented technology at all, because the
>    necessary rights cannot be acquired.

Doesn't that sound like a bug in the OSS licenses to you, assuming the
desired result is to make the Internet work better?

> 1) I don't believe this is a 'send a postcard' license.  If you read
>    Mark's patent license, it starts with:
>
>    "Upon request, RedPhone Security will ...
>
>    I interpret this to mean that unless RedPhone responds to your
>    requests, you have not received any rights.  Is this incorrect?

I'm assuming you will get a postcard in reply, certainly.
> There are examples where companies won't respond to requests for these
> type of RF patent licenses.

The phrase you quote doesn't allow for that.

> A recent example that came to mind was
> related to the BOCU patent by IBM:
>
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.text.unicode.devel/23256

I won't respond here on that specific issue.

> A different problem is if the patent is owned by a small company, and
> the company goes away.

Normally the patent will fall into the hands of whoever strips
the assets. That's why a carefully constructed perpetual RF
license is needed, in any case.
> Still, I'm not sure even a "send-a-postcard" patent license would be
> compatible with free software licenses.  Sending the postcard appear
> to be an additional requirement, something that some free software
> licenses explicitly forbid.

I think that is a bug in the OSS licenses. Whatever you or I may think
of patent law, it isn't going away, and the OSS licenses need to deal
with it realistically IMHO.

   Brian

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