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Red Hat Makes Patent Promise
colonel writes "In a followup to an earlier story about Red Hat filing for software patents, a "promise" has appeared on RedHat's website stating that they do not intend to pursue patents against software licensed under a specific set of licenses. It's not binding in perpetuity, and some licenses are notably absent in the list of approved licences, like the LGPL. But, at least Red Hat's made their intentions clear now."
Publicly stated corporate policies pledging good behavior toward intellectual property should be as commonplace as privacy policies have become.
This is quite deliberate. It's not possible to approve LGPL without opening up a hole that allows J. Random Megacorp to make an LGPL licensed librhpatents.so, which lets them use the patents with closed source proprietary apps. My only complaint with Red Hat about this is that they haven't made it binding in perpetuity.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Redhat has competition in the OSS industry and it won't take much for anyone running Redhat to switch to Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Suse or any of the other distros (not to mention the *BSDs)
Redhat knows that the people who run their OS are smart and more than often, open source advocates. It would be foolish to piss those people off.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
This'll be policy for as long as the shareholders allow it. The moment they get a whiff of Big Money to be made enforcing the patents, they'll about-face.
It's not just the people who use their OS, but also the people who write their OS.
I don't know about this one.
Patents are used as weapons these days, without any regard for their validity.
The RedHat folks are right about one thing: the best defense against a patent suit is to hold the patent yourself.
Software patents are particularly bad. The PTO hands them out like cents-off coupons at a supermarket. Once in hand, they are presumed valid, a presumption that is difficult and expensive to overturn.
They could also argue that their patent collection is not conceptually different from the GPL itself. After all RMS, Bradley Kuhn and assorted other FSF luminaries are on record as saying that IP shouldn't exist at all. In a world without IP, you can't have a GPL, and, presumably, don't need one. Yet, in our world, we have a GPL that relies on current IP law.
These things make sense to me.
But...
Software patents so distort the whole software sphere.
I guess, in the end, my head understands RedHat's moves, but my heart is deeply troubled.
True, however, this isn't Microsoft, it's Redhat, and they're not a monopoly.
Technically MSFT wasn't a monopoly in the beginning either. They had IBM DOS, OS/2 and MacOS [finder, whatever] to compete with in the early days.
Who knows, perhaps 10 years from now we will be RH bashers instead?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
He was using Microsoft as an example of companies that change their mind. There are plenty more. Think Yahoo ( we won't sell your id), Hewlett Packard (The HP3000 has a long life ahead of it), Yahoo again (we know you opted out but you'll have to do it again because we didn't like it), AT&T ( yes, we sold you megabit cable access but we didn't expect you to use it so you can't), Tivo (that machine you thought you bought from us is really ours to use as we wish).
The original parent post was right on - if Redhat sees a need to change their mind, they will - their post notwithstanding. Or go even deeper and read their post with a modicum of scepticsm and you'll see plenty of wiggle adjectives that give them leeway to do as they wish.
A "patent GPL" would appear to be quite possible.
IANAL, as ever, but it would seem to have to do the following:
1. License the patents (rather than agree to not enforce them), in perpetuity to any person for the use in GPL software, for no money (but see 3. for the consideration)
2. Grant the licensee the right to license the patent to other people under the same terms (so that if RHAT gets bought, its patents stay free as long as there is one free software guy with a license somewhere).
3. In exchange for the rights in 1,2, licensee agrees to license any derived patent under these same terms.
Dress that up in lawyer-speak, and you're done.
OK, then assign the patents to the FSF.
No? Why not?
There's only one answer to that question. Red Hat wants to retain the ability to leverage these patents against other Open Source companies.
I'm not saying that as though it's a great revelation: Red Hat are a commercial company, and their main competitors aren't Redmond, but other Linux distros. What I am saying is that they are being hypocritical about this, and that their actions - and the specifics of their promise - don't match their high ideals.
Here's what they've actually promised:
This is a thin promise. Open source developers are still infringing their patents, they're just not (at the moment) going to prosecute those infringements. That's a nasty sword of Damocles they're dangling over our heads.
Again, ask yourself why if Red Hat are actually serious about their claim to loathe patents and support open source they don't assign the patents to the FSF, or at a minimum, actually waive rights or grant an implicit or explicit license to open source developers. The actions and the promise don't match the rhetoric.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Notice the first word in my post: "True". I am in agreement, I'm just trying to say that in the current OSS distribution environment, it would be foolish for RH to try and "pull a Microsoft".
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
In all the westerns I saw, the white hats and black hats both had guns. The white-hats were just more careful about who they shot. Betchya the Red-hats will be too.
I write code.
This is true, and because of their history I'm inclined to believe that's what they intend.
/will/ go after people who use their "patents" in their lgpl/bsd licensed software?
Unfortunately, we have absolutely no guarantees. This is only what the redhat of today intends, and the people currently running it won't be running it forever. Some future nimrod who ends up running redhat might see things differently, or be forced to see things differently by a board of directors.
Their exclusion of some very valid licenses (eg lgpl and bsd) concerns me as well. Does this mean they
Is this yet another attempt to scare people into using the GPL?
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Secondly, Red Hat's income no longer comes from selling CDs to hobbiests. Take a look at their recent earnings report. $15.7 million of that $18.6 million in revenue comes from "enterprise" sales. Meaning consulting and training, mostly. Red Hat makes no secret that they intend to become some kind of "e-business player" and is trying very hard to shed its image as a hobbiest's company -- something most companies involving Linux are doing too.
Please don't dismiss this so quickly. Red Hat is changing my friend, and fast.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
SGI used to tell their employees that they filed patents purely as a defense (they had been sued).
Then SGI sued NVIDIA because they were losing in the market.
Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft because they needed cash.
Patents are an asset, once they are aquired they can be abused and sold irrespective of what the original intent was.
Expecting RH to be a moral, upright corporate citizen because otherwise they'll piss off a lot of smart geeks doesn't seem to carry much weight. Witness Blizzard squashing bnetd - /. carried a fawning WC-III review a few weeks after Blizzard filed suit. How many people didn't buy a PIV because of Intel's idiotic suit against "Yogi Inside?"
If at some point, RH thinks they can use their patents to kill other distros I don't doubt they'll try - pissed off geeks or no. Moral suasion doesn't appear to work these days.
wait- you think that PHP is an alternative to Java? have you either used either one?
and Mono!?!? give it a couple of years and perhaps it will be an alternative to Java. should the Apache people sit on their hands until then?
Like many open source advocates, I am generally opposed to the idea of software patents, particularly under the current US patent system.
It is very hard for me to understand why anyone should be granted a 17 year monopoly on something in an industry that changes so quickly. Given the relatively low cost of developing new algorithms (compared to say drug research), the amount of simultaneous development, and the vast amount of prior work and prior art that all programming depends on, it seems a little disingenous for anyone to even apply for a software patent.
But as is often the case reality doesn't exactly jive with our open source utopia.
I have long thought that the FSF (as inimical or oxymoronic as that would be) or some other open source leadership group should create a foundation to manage software patents on behalf of open source developers.
The foundation would have clearly established rules for licensing and royalties and patent grantees so inclined could assign their patents there.
Eventually the open source community would have a portfolio of patents that they could use as a defense against software patents owned by corporations.
At the same time, this would have the benefit of calling attention to the inanity of PTO granting software patents.
It seems to me that this is what RedHat is doing - and I give them a lot of credit for it. The danger is that these patents become an asset of the corporation. While the current management may be completely trustworthy in this respect, there is always the danger that a change of control might put the patents at considerable risk.
Anyway, what do people think? What is open source's best defense against a world of software patents?