Ideally a license like the GPL should be well designed enough (I believe that it is) to keep everyone out of the coutroom. If it does lead to a lawsuit, I agree with you that it will be the least painful and most inexpensive way to establish a legal precedent in favor of GPL enforcement.
If the offending party were a large corporation there would (obviously) be the danger of having a precendent laid down that weakens GPL enforcement. Beyond this, a great amount of skewed information about the GPL would be unfairly hurled into the courtroom and broadcasted in the mainstream media by the offending defendants. The doubts and concerns arising from such discourse may dissuade some developers and certainly a great many larger development shops from releasing their source code and releasing under the GPL.
We are fortunate that this instance, firstly, is such a clear violation of the GPL and, secondly, that the violation was perpetrated by a party who definitely cannot win by fright or by might.
I think that the idea behind Open Patents is not to subvert this patent system, as backwards as it can get from time to time. The idea here is to give the open source movement in general a chance to thrive and compete with the established technology businesses.
Patents are a tool and we can use it just as well as anyone else can. We just have to know how.
We will use the patent system just like the big corporations do and just like the small time inventor does. With the right kind of Open Patent license (or whatever it will be called), patents will be used to give the open source community key advantages so that we can thrive and can continue to innovate.
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If the offending party were a large corporation there would (obviously) be the danger of having a precendent laid down that weakens GPL enforcement. Beyond this, a great amount of skewed information about the GPL would be unfairly hurled into the courtroom and broadcasted in the mainstream media by the offending defendants. The doubts and concerns arising from such discourse may dissuade some developers and certainly a great many larger development shops from releasing their source code and releasing under the GPL.
We are fortunate that this instance, firstly, is such a clear violation of the GPL and, secondly, that the violation was perpetrated by a party who definitely cannot win by fright or by might.
- James Martin Luther
Patents are a tool and we can use it just as well as anyone else can. We just have to know how.
We will use the patent system just like the big corporations do and just like the small time inventor does. With the right kind of Open Patent license (or whatever it will be called), patents will be used to give the open source community key advantages so that we can thrive and can continue to innovate.
- James Martin Luther