[OT?] GPL v3 FUD, was For Approval: MLL (minimal library license)

[Matthew Flaschen]

Chris Travers wrote:

> 1)  Inadvertent granting of patent license through internal
> distribution of software (i.e. if I work for company X and download a
> copy of the GCC, put it on a file share so other team members can use
> it, Company X may just have granted patent licenses for any patents
> that are covered in the GCC to all GCC users as my action seems to
> match the criteria for conveyance).

Internal distribution and modification (which may or may not actually be
distribution under copyright law) is not conveyance.  Conveyance is a
subset of propagation, and propagation expressly excludes "modifying a
private copy."  A copy private to a company (obviously assuming this
company is real, rather than a meaningless shell) is still a private copy.

Moreover, GPLv3 only requires that "contributor[s] grants you a
non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the
contributor's essential patent claims".  If you only convey (again,
though, your example is not conveyance) without modifying, you are not a
contributor.

You may be getting this confused with the separate license condition that:

"you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or
counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed
by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program
or any portion of it."

The effect of this latter condition is that once you sue (and you /can/
sue successfully if you're not a contributor, having never granted a
license), you permanently lose rights to future conveyance because of
section 8 (termination).

> 2)  Applicability of 7(2) permissions removal requirements to BSDL
> files included verbatim.  The SFLC seems to think that this issue can
> safely be ignored (i.e. pretend that the BSDL gives you this right but
> just don't exercise it).  Answers like that leave me unwilling to
> assume that the licenses can be safely used together because
> theoretical problems have a nasty way of surfacing as real problems in
> unforeseen circumstances.

That document was not (at least not deliberately) an answer to your
question/concern.  It was written as a response to a different issue.

>> Strangely, you fail to express the same concerns about longer and
>> radically more complex licenses.
>>
> Such as?  Are any such licenses on-topic here?

I would argue that none of the licenses we're now discussing are really
on topic (hence the [OT]), because:

1. There seems to be fairly firm consensus that MLL is not worth approving.

2. BSD and GPLv3 are both definitely approved by OSI.

Other complex approved licenses include Reciprocal Public License and
Adaptive Public License, but I don't see a need to rehash them either.

Matt Flaschen