David Picón Álvarez wrote:
From: "Alex Hudson" home@alexhudson.com
It doesn't seem to make any argument why sub-licensing would be desirable and/or necessary for free software.
Interesting, for some reason I was under the impression that sublicencing was part of the essential legal machinery of free software, it turns out the GPL 3 for instance does not use sublicencing but conveying gives a licence from the upstream creator of the work.
GPLv2 worked in the same way too I think (though not worded as explicitly as it is in v3). In general, I tend to think of sublicensing as being very rare - you only really need it if you're changing the license (or, at least, varying it somehow).
Well, in theory the whole point of IPR is that those things which are not valuable (common knowledge, lacking a creative input (in copyrights) or an inventive step (patents) are in the public domain. Those things which cost money/labour to create/invent are privatized in the hope this incentivises people to invest that labour or money. If you can get the returns of that privatization without making the investment, that's a failure mode of the system, no?
I wouldn't say so, in the same way that not getting any returns by making that same investment also isn't a failure mode of the system either. It's a system of risk.
Maybe worse is better is an acceptable strategy here. As in, maybe after things become so legally dangerous because thousands of SMEs have all kinds of patents, the big companies would think twice.
Potentially, but I think it probably makes things worse. The problem SMEs have isn't that they can't acquire patents, it's that they can't litigate them effectively against competitors. They would be well-placed to wave them against free software though.
Cheers,
Alex.