From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T23:17:42+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Open Source Licenses against Software Patents


On Jan 20, 2005, at 9:06 AM, Thursday wrote:

> Pit Capitain wrote:
>> Applying for a new RubyForge project is harder than I thought :-), 
>> cause I have to choose a suitable license. I'd like to have a very 
>> liberal and easily understandable one like the MIT license [1] for 
>> example. But I also want to explicitly exclude companies holding 
>> software patents from this license. Do you know of any licenses with 
>> similar goals?
>> Regards,
>> Pit
>> [1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html
>
> Software patents have both positive and negative aspects.  Anyone 
> simply preaching that it is all bad or all good are merely displaying 
> their ignorance.
>

He wasn't preaching, he was simply stating a preference as to who else 
could use the code that he's releasing to the world for free. When 
_you_ release code to the world for free, you can set your own terms, 
though the tone of your post makes me guess that you're the sort of 
person who'd rather snipe from the sidelines than roll up his sleeves 
and get to work.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/