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Relevant text from FSF's "Covenant Not to Assert"

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as published circa late 2006-07 (around time of GPLv3 Second Discussion Draft)

I (Bradley M. Kuhn) carefully went through FSF's "Covenant Not to Assert",
which appears to have been published on Wednesday 2 August 2006 (a few days
after the second GPLv2 discussion draft published on Thursday 27 July 2006),
and merged in any relevant text and descriptions that might be of use in this
tutorial.

However, since the patent provisions changed some much over the drafting of
GPLv3, there was not much text useful to bring in on this one.

The raw material used for this commit can be found here:
    http://gplv3.fsf.org/opinions-draft-2.html
Specifically, a copy of the LaTeX sources are here:
    http://gplv3.fsf.org/covenant-not-to-assert-dd2.tex

As I merged in this text, I added FIXME's where it seemed the text was
incomplete or referred to parts of GPLv3 draft text that disappeared in later
versions.

Finally, note that this material was originally copyrighted and licensed as
follows:

  Copyright © 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

  Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted
  worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice, and the
  copyright notice, are preserved.

However, I am hereby relicensing this material to CC-By-SA-4.0, with the
verbal permission from John Sullivan, Executive Director of the FSF, which
was given to me during a conference call on Wednesday 12 February 2014.
This commit is contained in:
Free Software Foundation, Inc 2006-08-02 16:38:49 -04:00 committed by Bradley M. Kuhn
parent 290774c3e8
commit 7090007b0d
1 changed files with 22 additions and 0 deletions
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gpl-lgpl.tex
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@ -2928,6 +2928,28 @@ of rights under the license.
\section{GPLv3~\S11: Explicit Patent Licensing}
\label{GPLv3s11}
% FIXME: just brought in words here, needs rewriting.
is rooted in the basic principles of the GPL.
Our license has always stated that distributors may not impose further
restrictions on users' exercise of GPL rights. To make the suggested
distinction between contribution and distribution is to allow a
distributor to demand patent royalties from a direct or indirect
recipient, based on claims embodied in the distributed code. This
undeniably burdens users with an additional legal restriction on their
rights, in violation of the license.
%FIXME: possible useful text, but maybe not.
In the covenant provided in the revised section 11, the set of claims
that a party undertakes not to assert against downstream users are that
party's ``essential patent claims'' in the work conveyed by the party.
``Essential patent claims,'' a new term defined in section 0, are simply
all claims ``that would be infringed by making, using, or selling the
work.'' We have abandoned the phrase ``reasonably contemplated use.''
This change makes the obligations of distributing patent holders more
predictable.
% FIXME: probably needs a lot of work, these provisions changed over time.
GPLv3 adds a new section on licensing of patents. GPLv2 relies on an implied