Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I must admit that I have been watching this whole "released" patents thing with slight amusement. Doesn't it strikes to anyone that this movement essentially declares to do the same to innovation and market, what original patent system claimed (and actually did, too) to do.
What we have turned this system into, that we now engineer a ways around it now? (but at least it's actually pretty nice to see that needs and deeds of the smart remains the same over the time despite the corporate USA.)
they are not "owned" by the community. the community gets a free license to use them
Its a great thing that CA is giving open source these patents to help secure itself, but the long term solution here should be to avoid giving validity to software patents and fighting their existence. There has been success in europe on this front (although not entirely, I believe) and surely not having to deal with the patent minefield would be better than having a collection of defensive patents...
Business Voyeur
This is a nice gesture, but it won't address the real problem, no matter how many companies "donate" patents.
A patent pool could possibly help if it is actively defensive. In other words, it has to be structured like the GPL -- allowing some patent-pool entity to retaliate when a patent abuser like Amazon sues to enforce One-Click BS.
It could work such that by joining the patent pool, you get the right to use all of its patents but in return you have to place all of your own patents in the pool. (Unfortunately, there are many loopholes in this system, like creating multiple corporations to bypass the responsibility provisions... Also, it does nothing to address the "patent factories" who churn out hundreds of patents on basic concepts while selling no actual product.)
Anyway, the ideal solution is to get rid of software patents entirely. There is no reason for them to exist, except to allow people to monopolize ideas and hinder true invention.
Lots of companies file patents they say are "defensive". That is, they say they won't prevent anyone else from developing the patented invention. They just need to fill the vacuum, getting a patent before someone else files an "offensive" patent which would be used to prevent others from developing that invention. But until the day comes when the "defensive" company changes its tune (maybe after changing ownership), we never can know whether the patent will be used offensively - and then it's too late.
What's wrong with releasing these patents into the public domain? We have a "fourth state", beyond the mysteriously dual states of "offensive" and "defensive" patents, and the vacuum of "no patent (yet)". Why do we need "an industrywide patent commons"? Why don't IBM and CA just release these patents into the public domain? They lose no more, and the "holding company" can't later be abused to control "submarine patents" that surface to catch entrapped users.
I'm sure that IBM's and CA's patent lawyers know more about the public domain than I do. They don't need me to think this up. But since we could get everything they're promising with a "public domain release", and they're not doing it, I suspect foul play.
--
make install -not war
What's wrong with releasing these patents into the public domain? We have a "fourth state", beyond the mysteriously dual states of "offensive" and "defensive" patents, and the vacuum of "no patent (yet)". Why do we need "an industrywide patent commons"? Why don't IBM and CA just release these patents into the public domain? They lose no more, and the "holding company" can't later be abused to control "submarine patents" that surface to catch entrapped users.
A very good point. Originally, it used to be that most research at colleges, universities, and any federal or state authorities was - by default - created as a public domain patent. But sadly this is now regarded as IP (Intellectual Property), and zealously guarded by those same institutions that used to have it be free.
Sure, open source could use the revenue - and there will be revenue - from such private patents, but if they were released into the public domain it would free up innovation.
And freeing up innovation and creation is the whole point behind having a patent process in the first place. At least in the USA when they were created as part of the Constitution.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A bad idea is a bad idea and should be opposed even if there would be some short term benefits to "do as they do". 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 think it's great that people have the guts, stamina and principles to do what they think is the long term right thing even though it's not the easy path.
Software patents simple is a horrible and flawed idea and so it should never be acknowledged as a viable way forward.
Spine World
I read through the one about detecting that threads/processes have died, and wasn't impressed there either. It takes all that space to declare the following algorithm: ... hell, we wouldn't even know where to look. And does keeping competitors from using this technology have any result on the bottom-line (excluding patent royalties)? "Oh no, they can also find out if a process dies by querying the operating system via a documented interface -- our entire product line is doomed! We'll never be able to make money off our database server software!"
while(1)
{
ask operating system for list of processes / threads
compare to previous results
diff
new things are new
missing things are missing
store list for next pass
wait()
}
It even includes the term "periodically", telling me we're talking about polling for this information, not registering callbacks of any sort to actually trap the events exactly as they happen. And they patented this? "How to use an operating system's API to do exactly what that API was meant for"?
It's not a marketable patent, even. It's not like an entire car engine design, where the patent covers a large chunk of the final product. We can't point to the patent and say "you protected technology that you weren't relying upon to make money!" because it's so little
The software companies are only doing this so software patents aren't eliminated completely. By pretending that their useless patents on XOR are helpful to the Free Software community (and thereby looking like the "good guys"), they keep the "good" patents to themselves. If they didn't give away their worthless ones, people would start questioning the software patenting process, and probably eliminate it.
Don't support this. Vote to abolish software patents completely! If mathematics can't be patented, why can algorithms!?
My other car is first.
The GPL is not a club to use against software patents (though it should do what it can to prevent attacks on the GPL itself). The hack that is the GPL only works because copyrights don't cost anything, and even if you register them, it doesn't cost much. Patents are in the thousands of dollars, and defending them (a requirement for them to be valid) is just out of the question for smaller organizations. Copyright is an entirely different animal, it does not have to be defended to be valid. And infringement is much more cut and dried for copyright.
What really needs to happen is that IBM and other OSS-friendlies should stop cross-licensing their patents to ANYBODY except under terms that as you describe, require the licensor to license their own patents to OSS.
Now that's a club. Imagine the liability involved. Right now the system is analogous to everyone having nuclear weapons that they can somehow only point at the little countries. Without cross-licensing, everyone would have live nukes pointed at their corporate neighbors.
Will it happen? No. We'd have a better chance of getting the law changed, but I know no one is holding their breath on that either.
-- John.
- We must be consistent when we say software patents are bad.
- Patent law is not copyright law, and copyright is fairly universally accepted as applying to code.
- If you publish it correctly then your prior work invalidates future patents.
- You run the risk of turning the GPL into an unenforceable license
It's not that it's a bad idea. The problem is that it doesn't send a clear message and it just wouldn't work as well. It would be better to send the message that if you release software under the GPL you renounce the patent liability to those who make derivative works from that code. This doesn't force people to release their code, but it ensure that they are either working on a derivative (which would obviously have to be GPL), have a license from the patent holder, or are infringing if they use the patented process. This also deals with patents without supporting them in any way, and could even be combined with words that strongly state the framers' views on patents.If we accept them by trying to enforce them then we are sending a message that they should be enforced against us. This means that we're, to a degree, accepting the one click patent and others. Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright.
Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright. Patents must be obtained and this costs money, few companies would be willing to patent ideas put into free software anyhow. What they're doing now isn't quite the same, they're simply saying that they won't sue Free software developers for using their patents, and typically those are patents that aren't making them any money anyhow.
Why patent something when you'll have documented evidence of prior works? You're fronting money to try to avoid a lawsuit that shouldn't happen. If it's going to happen then you haven't saved yourself anything because they'll just try to invalidate the patent or license, or they'll claim that they had prior works of their own preceding yours.
The GPL is already questioned by some. We generally laugh these people away. However, the first time someone sues a software company that they must either release something as open source or be found guilty of patent infringement then the reasonability of the license will probably come into question. A couple bad judges and you may invalidate the license on a lot of works. If nothing else, the patent aspect may be found useless because it will probably be difficult or impossible to show that you actually incurred damages for software that is Free for all to use.
> But what if you are writing derived commercial applications?
:)
Assuming that by "commercial applications", you mean, "proprietary, non-free, closed-source, applications," then your situation is unchanged. You have no more rights to use those patents than you did yesterday, but nobody on slashdot gives a rat's ass about you anyway, so, so what?
(Actually, you are, I'm sure, perfectly welcome to negotiate a patent license with CA if you don't like the terms of their generous public donation. But I suppose it's more fun to whine on slashdot.)
Otherwise, the answer is, your commercial applications have to be free/libre/open-source commercial applications. Then there's no problem.
> any BSD or MIT license would be completely subverted
"Completely subverted?" What are you? The hyperbole fairy? Try "somewhat limited" and I might go along with you. I mean, when I've released code under BSD or MIT licenses, I've been assuming that it was so that anyone could benefit freely from the code. Not just people creating proprietary commercial derivatives. If I'd known it was just for propietary commercial derivatives, I probably wouldn't have bothered!
> The only way to clean up this mess is to overhaul the patent system (unlikely) or to release the patents to the public, *without* any restrictions.
Well, either, a) you're the kind of insane BSD fanatic who makes the Stallmanites look like moderates, or b) you're a greedy bastard who just wants other people to give him free money. I won't speculate which. But, needless to say, I disagree with you. Not that I'm not sympathetic to your point of view; but I still disagree.
The point about the impact of this (and IBM's patent grant) on BSD/MIT licenses is an important one, and I'm glad you raised the point. I just wish you hadn't resorted to such histrionics in doing so.
The real problem is that software patents are bad for everyone, except for large corporations that can agree to cross-license patent portfolios. This allows the large corporations to block small companies from even entering the software business and provides a weapon with which to attack OSS projects the corporations don't like.
It doesn't matter how many 'good guys' contribute patents to a patents common, as long as there are companies that are going to use patents as weapons in the marketplace.
Even more importantly, this doesn't address the fundemental problems with using patents on software in the first place. In a world with software patents, it will eventually become almost impossible to write code w/o having a staff of patent lawyers to make sure it isn't infringing. Eventually, the cost just to make sure code isn't infringing will become another barrier to entry for software companies. Patents and software aren't like oil and water, they are like Hydrogen and Oxygen. Sooner or later, they'll blow up in all our faces.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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