[Fedora-legal-list] Mutual Termination for Patent Action on webmin

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 00:31 +0900, Mamoru Tasaka wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I am trying to look at webmin review request (bug 468570)
> because this is the second package the reporter (and my sponsornee)
> submitted. Then:
> 
> webmin 1.430 has "PATENTS" file which contains:
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mutual Termination for Patent Action. The License for the use of Webmin shall
> terminate automatically and You may no longer exercise any of the rights granted
> to You by this License if:
> 
> 1. You file a lawsuit in any court alleging that any software that is licensed
> under this license infringes any patent claims that are essential to use
> that software.
> 
> 2. You file a lawsuit in any court alleging that any OSI Certified open source
> software that is licensed under any license containing a "Mutual Termination
> for Patent Action" clause infringes any patent claims that are essential to use 
> that software.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Can we treat this as one of the "licenses"? If so, I would appreciate it
> if this "license" is named if this is free and want to know if this is
> compatible with GPLv3 (perhaps this is not compatible with GPLv2). 

This is not a separate license, rather, it is an additional clause for
the webmin license (which is otherwise BSD). This additional clause
makes the webmin license GPLv2 and GPLv3 incompatible.

Since webmin is a web application, there should not be any real concern
as a result of this incompatibility (aside from code copying), but I
will need to add a new entry to the Licensing table for webmin. Use:
 
License: Webmin

~spot