3 ms·

It's always good to see more development in this area. Here's hope the runtimes become as rock solid as they should have been in the first place (given their ce

It's always good to see more development in this area. Here's hope the runtimes become as rock solid as they should have been in the first place (given their central role in the container story). I can't help but notice the UPL license is an odd choice. The whole thing about contributors granting patent licenses.. isn't that a legal minefield?

cyphar 9y ago
Both Apache-2.0 and [L]GPLv3 have patent licensing clauses as well. Patents are a more general problem that you cannot solve with just a license, but patent license clauses avoid patent treachery[1] by construction -- as long as you can trace back your copy of the software to a patent holder then the patent cannot be used against you. This is obviously not ideal, the ideal solution would be to eradicate the concept of software patents entirely, but as far as legal hacks go this is as good as you can get. Patents are a legal minefield (for users) whether or not your licenses talk about them (though licenses that remain silent about patents open you up to patent treachery) because of the laws that surround them (independent discovery is not protected). As for patent holders, they simply are not allowed to both distribute software under those licenses and harass users of said software using patents contained in the software. I think that's more than a fair trade (in fact, the scales are tipped in their favour because they can still sue you if someone else independently discovers something they patented). [1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#small https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#sm... -- In particular `[...] it does prevent patent holders from setting up a “bait and switch” where they release the software under free terms then require recipients to agree to nonfree terms in a patent license.`
- gtirloni 9y ago
  Thank you, that was very informative.

cyphar 9y ago

Both Apache-2.0 and [L]GPLv3 have patent licensing clauses as well. Patents are a more general problem that you cannot solve with just a license, but patent license clauses avoid patent treachery[1] by construction -- as long as you can trace back your copy of the software to a patent holder then the patent cannot be used against you. This is obviously not ideal, the ideal solution would be to eradicate the concept of software patents entirely, but as far as legal hacks go this is as good as you can get. Patents are a legal minefield (for users) whether or not your licenses talk about them (though licenses that remain silent about patents open you up to patent treachery) because of the laws that surround them (independent discovery is not protected). As for patent holders, they simply are not allowed to both distribute software under those licenses and harass users of said software using patents contained in the software. I think that's more than a fair trade (in fact, the scales are tipped in their favour because they can still sue you if someone else independently discovers something they patented). [1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#small https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#sm... -- In particular `[...] it does prevent patent holders from setting up a “bait and switch” where they release the software under free terms then require recipients to agree to nonfree terms in a patent license.`

gtirloni 9y ago
Thank you, that was very informative.