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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 07:10 PM EDT |
Yes, though you don't want to specifically mention Oracle by name. Add a clause
like "asserting software patents in a lawsuit (other than in counterclaims)
is a violation of the terms of this license and will result in immediate,
automatic revocation of all granted permissions."
ISTR that at least one open-source license already includes such a clause.
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| Authored by: ThrPilgrim on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 07:16 PM EDT |
I think you can do what you like with copyrights. Hows this?
I hear by licence this comment to all except the following. Oracle Corporation
(ORCL), nor it's subsidiaries nor any joint venture in which
a) Oracle directly or indirectly controls 5% or more of the joint common stock
or
b) Oracle directly or indirectly controls 5% or more of the voting stock at the
Annual General Meeting
or
C) Oracle directly or indirectly controls 5% or more of the votes on the board
of directors.
---
Beware of him who would deny you access to information for in his heart he
considers himself your master.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: greed on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 09:20 PM EDT |
I could have sworn there was stuff on either the FSF or GNU about whether such
action--amending the licenses--should be taken against companies like SCO.
Ah, found it: it's in GCC, but you have to go into the historic versions to find
the original version of README.SCO--unless you're like me and actually have the
source for GCC 3.3 hanging around live.
The critical words are: "However, the direct effect of this action would
fall on users of GCC rather than on SCO."
Same thing seems to apply here. GPLed software is already GPLed, so that's no
worry--Oracle's victims I mean customers already have the rights they need, if
Oracle uses GPL or LGPL code. (Assuming the "no additional
restrictions" clause can be read as a patent grant.)
If you have agreement to amend the license, you can protect against all attacks
by going to a patent-aware copyleft anti-TiVo license: you'll notice the GPL v3
does not need to call out TiVo by name, it just needs to prohibit the behaviour.
(Actually, it works by requiring the desired behaviour--a much better
approach.)
I would recommend the same approach; if for some reason you can't just go with
the GPL v3 but do have control over the licensing, make sure that your license
really does spell out what you want your downstream to follow.
If you want to use a BSD- or Apache-like license, and yet block Oracle from
these tricks (or Apple from theirs)... well, I'm afraid I can't help you: the
solution, to me, seems to be Copyleft.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 01:45 AM EDT |
Yeah I had the same Idea yesterday. Should defiantly be possible. My idea was
to have a copyright license for your public API declarations that give explicit
writes to copy and use them (but not the implementations etc). But then you add
a clause saying you lose the rights in this license if you have now or in the
past tried to enforce your copyrighted API's on others. Just need a few of the
companies Oracle consumes API's from to implement this...
There is a slight problem in that if you follow though and sue Oracle because
they are using your API's which they don't have rights to because of their
actions then you break that same license! Others have suggested making it not
exempt people who are defending lawsuits with counterclaims. However this may
not help because the company that can attack oracle for using their API's would
not be the same as the one that Oracle may attack. This means that there is no
real threat of enforcing anything against people like Oracle because you would
have to break it to enforce it. So maybe a clause to say that any company that
opens up all there API decorations copyrights with this license or equivalent
will not be excluded from the license grant.
Also another Idea is to have a clause to reinstate the rights to these API
declaration copyrights if you put aside all copyright claims to yours going
forward.
I don't know if you would be able to do anything about Patent protection with a
copyright license like this though. Maybe add to the exemption clause that
enforcing patents over the use of your API's is grounds for exclusion as well
but this may make it harder for some companies to want to implement this
license.
Also note that such a license needs to make it clear that it only grants extra
copyright protection and does not restrict anything else. You don't want it to
conflict with GPL licenses. Also these API's you are giving away copyright
license for will already be fully covered by many other things so they may not
have to even use this license. For example any GPL'd code already has a
copyright license to them anyway so it won't affect these projects. However
someone wanted to start a new closed source or alternative license open source
project that uses the API's could use this license so they can re-implement or
use the API as they want.
Also the biggest point this license would need to make is that API's should NOT
be restricted because of SSO etc and should always be free to use. And the only
reason we are licensing what we think should already be covered by fair use or
other things is to make the law clearer on this and stop others trying to
restrict it on their API's.
Even if Oracle loses on the copyrights it may still be up in the air as to if
someone can sue over API's in the future so an industry lead solution may be a
cheap way to fix the problem without waiting for more law suits later.
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