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CA Releases Patents to OSS
simonfairfax writes "ComputerWorld reports that Computer Associates International has released 14 patents to the opensource community, following IBM's lead. From the article: 'CA said it is joining IBM in encouraging other companies to create an industrywide "patent commons" in which patents are pledged royalty-free to further innovation in areas of broad interest to developers and users of IT.'"
Looking through here, it seems like these aren't CA's lame ducks either...
The actual list of patents can be found at CA's website
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Yeah, let's worry about that new GPL that hasn't even been drafted yet (and a first draft isn't expected until 2007 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/gpl_fsf/)
If you really cared, you'd get your opinion in early: http://www.fsf.org/Members/peterb/gplv3
Then it's a good thing the GPL isn't about open-source. ;)
- for-freedom.html
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-software
The new GPL (which no one has seen) does not "prohibit use by (software) patent owners."
The only comment from fsf on this is is that you will lose your license to use a particular piece of software if you sue users/creators of that piece of software for patent infringement. Not scary at all.
Besides the comment is meaningless, since a license is for users and redistributors of your code not the creator of the code. You can't license yourself out of your own code unless you transfer ownership to another party in a contractually valid way, or release to the public domain.
-- John.
"Software patents are a reality."
While it might surprise you, I still think I have to say it. Sorry, but patenting software isn't allowed over here. Where? Good old Europe of course. Even though we all thought the EU would change that, they have spared us for a while. Probably the lobbyists tried to get away too cheap. Or maybe there are a few intelligent politicians over there. I don't know for sure. Anyway, the use of software patents to help the cause of OSS won't really succed as long as you can just start some small company in a country without them. Sell your stuff over internet and it's your customers who brake the patent laws. This is, if it's really feasible to use patents anyway. I doubt it for some elusive reason.
http://ca.com/patents/oss/
I'd take that as a "yes."
Starting to use patents would give this particular bad idea legitimacy and would only start another arms race. And we've seen how good that works for solving any problems...
I actually disagree with you here. The only possible arms race would be from completely closed source vendors (maybe Microsoft but I even doubt it there) and a much larger community of vendors interested in protecting their investment in a common good. For this reason, I can see licenses like the Apache license getting more common, and I suspect that the GPL 3 will have the same sort of power to it in this area. These licenses have a very real effect of creating patent pools with which to defend open source.
Now. Here is why this does not result in an arms race. The patents which are then used by widespread software projects licensed under these terms (currently think Apache) become extremely toothless. One cannot sue over patent infringements with these projects because you depend on the software too. So while IBM could sue over patents which are in Apache, as long as the suit was about some way that SCO Unixware did something, but they cannot easily sue Covalent over Apache without losing their rights to use the code in Websphere..... See how it works?
It actually gets worse for patent holders.
Lets say my firm makes software that infringes on Microsoft patents and competes with Microsoft products. If they sue me, I rewrite the software to get around the patents. I pay some damages (because chances are it was not willful) and I go on with that additional publicity which might actually increase my sales. Indeed over the long run, perhaps I make money off of being sued. So many businesses avoid bringing these suits up because they don't want to acknowledge competition. If however, you wait too long, you may find yourself dependant on that same software.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What you're saying is true for copyright and the GPL but not for software licenses in general.
2 0050901_decision.pdf
Typical click-through software licenses limit what you can do with software. For example, reverse engineering is not allowed by most proprietary software. When you click, you are forming a contract, and these contracts do hold up in court as can be seen in the recent bnetd related decision.
So what the software vendors cannot control by copyright, they can instead control by contract, at least to the extent that a "breach of contract" civil suit is a threat to the user. For reverse engineering, for example, the liability can be quite significant, even without the kinds of statutory damages that copyright law provides for.
http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/
-- John.
On patents:
> defending them (a requirement for them to be valid)
That is for trademarks, you have to defend them to prevent the words from taking on a meaning that refers to the class of product instead of the product itself, ie "hoover" now means the same as "vacuum cleaner" and the trademark is thus lost since they didn't sue housewives for discussing their new hoovers when really they bought a hoover from Electrolux(TM) or Dyson(TM).
> infringement is much more cut and dried for copyright.
It certainly isn't, to infringe on a patent you must simply have distributed or used something that works in the manner described in the patent - subject to first sale. For copyright infringement you must have actually *copied* something from the original. Independent authoring of similar work (common in matters of logic and mathematics as for many problems there is one or maybe a couple of calculable "right answers") is permitted in copyright law since you didn't copy it.