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

On Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:16:30 AM +0200 Simon Josefsson 
<simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org> wrote:
> The assumption is false: the goal of free software is not to make the
> Internet work better.
The assumption is not false.  The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet 
work better.  I assume Brian chose those words with care; they are taken 
directly from the IETF's mission statement, RFC3935.

> The IETF has the goal of making the Internet work better.  Thus, the
> IETF has to accept the license reality, both proprietary and free
> software, and do whatever leads to a better Internet.
That does not always mean discarding technologies because the people who 
developed them want to protect their legal right to benefit from their 
invention, or to protect themselves from liability.  The reality is that 
the law is not going away, patents are not going away, and both the IETF 
and the free software community (to the extent that such a thing exists) 
need to learn to deal with that.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this message is not legal advice.

For the record, I think your concerns about this particular license are 
overstated.  Neither this patent license nor the open-source software 
licenses you quote are as buggy as you seem to think they are.  For 
example, the patent license contains the following text, which you quoted: 
"This general use license granted to manufacturers also flows down to 
sublicensees and users".  This would appear to have the effect that only 
the original implementor of the patented technology would need to obtain a 
license from RedPhone; he would then simply include in the software license 
a recursive sublicense for the patent.

The field-of-use restriction is annoying, of course, but I don't think it's 
actually fatal in this case.  The GPL does indeed prohibit "you"; that is, 
the GPL licensee, from imposing futher restrictions on recipients exercise 
of rights granted within the GPL.  However, it does not prevent such 
restrictions from already existing; the GPL does not prevent you from 
adding support to GPL'd software for patented crypto technology and then 
distributing the result, provided the patent license does not require you 
do place additional restrictions on the activities of people you distribute 
to.  In fact, the most common problem I've heard of with GPL 
incompatibility as it relates to patents is that the GPL prevents adding a 
restriction that requires preparers of derivative works to license any 
relevant IPR that they own.  The text you referenced in the Mozilla and 
Apache licenses are examples of such requirements, and make those licenses 
GPL-incompatible.
The Mozilla license covers this explicitly, again in the text you quote: 
"The Initial Developer hereby grants... subject to third party intellectual 
property claims".  Of course, that's not really the important part, since 
most people are not the Initial Developer.  What you really want is section 
2.2, "Subject to third party intellectual property claims, each Contributor 
hereby grants...".  In either case, what is going on here is that anyone 
who contributes code to software covered by that license must grant 
licenses to any relevant IPR that he owns; it explicitly excludes IPR owned 
by someone else.  Thus, it is possible to include patented crypto in 
software covered by the Mozilla license, even if the patent holder requires 
every user to pay a large fee to use the patented technology.
The section you refer to from the Apache license is similar - it consists 
of a license grant by each contributor of rights held _by that 
contributor_.  The grant does not cover IPR not held by the distributor.
In any case, the text you quote from the Mozilla and Apache licenses has 
nothing to do with the argument you are trying to make; it has no effect on 
the ability to create and distribute software under these licenses which 
implements technology patented by someone other than the contributor.  What 
makes these clauses problematic is that they cause the licenses that 
contain them to be GPL-incompatible (but not necessarily non-free).

-- Jeff

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf