On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Ben Cotton <bcotton(a)funnelfiasco.com>wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Pamela Chestek
<pchestek(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>> That strikes me as being somewhat vague.
>
> And that's a bad thing because ...?
It scares people off. First in the way that you describe, which I
agree is a GoodThing[tm]. What I'm concerned about is scaring off
people who are acting in good faith. I would expect (but have no way
to prove) that vague clauses that result in bad things happening are
more likely to prevent someone from adopting a covered work in the
first place than they are to prevent someone who was going to be a bad
actor anyway from acting badly.
The only ones you're scaring off are pro-patent, that is, they want more
latitude in throwing their patent weight around and want to be able to
threaten patent infringement. Are they going to be adopting a license that
has a patent grant in the first place?
I can't think of a situation where a good actor (defined as anti-software
patent) would want to retain the ability to assert a patent offensively,
but maybe I'm just not thinking of it.
Pam