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Open Source Business Model Using Software Patents
Joe Barr writes "Robin Miller has an exclusive video interview with Larry Rosen and Fred Popowich this morning on Linux.com about their new open source business model which includes software patents in its DNA. Their motto is 'Free for open source, everyone else pays.' Larry Rosen was once legal counsel for the OSI." Linux.com and Slashdot share a corporate parent.
One of the things that I found interesting in reading Richard Stallman's account in Free as in Freedom of his early Free Software visions was that he was essentially using the copyright system against itself. The sealing of information was an offensive concept to him, but the system could be gamed to ensure freedom of access. It sounds like this innovators are doing the same with the patent system. Now, someone just needs to bend trademark law backwards.
How is legal to freely license patents to one party while charging for those patents when licensed to another party?
Summary please :-)
Is this different from MySQL and the such models?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
As a small business owner that uses Linux, how would this affect me? My business model as it pertains to Linux works like this - I change the Linux source to do what I need it to do, sell my product and say it's a homegrown OS written especially for the hardware, then I just don't tell anyone that it's actually Linux. Anyone that threatens to reveal this to an outside party, I send my attorneys after.
this sort of model has been tried before and it tends not to work all that well. Usually, you end up with a company that may nominally use some open source licenses, but they might as well be proprietary. In particular, companies like this tend to use their power to prevent forking, and without forking being realistic, a project isnt really open source.
Patents for open source only really works if the patents are held by a separate non profit.
That's a great idea but it has two fundamental flaws.
1) Writing and releasing Free Software can be done at no cost (but the originators time). Software patents, like other patents cost
a great deal of money to acquire. That's a major problem with patents in general, they are a divisive and exclusive tool to
make the rich richer and the poor poorer, whereas copyright is granted by the act of creation since there is a material component (hence proof).
2) Gaming the copyright system to protect Openness is okay because Copyright is a moral concept with good uses that can be abused. Stallmans ideas just use the inhernt ``Good" in copyright to turn it to a more human and social aim. Software Patents on the other hand are bad, immoral, absurd and ridiculous. No sane person who understands what they are, the ownership of an idea, or worse, a fundamental abstract idea, can be moral and consistent. You cannot subvert this system to a greater good because you must lend weight to a rotten accident of Law and reinforce the evil you want to stop.
By a bad analogy: copyright is like guns, you can have good and bad uses. Software patents are like AIDS, nobody wants to argue that there's an upside. The only reasonable position on software patents is for their abolition and revision of the broken parts of the Law that allowd them in.
- http://olpcnews.com/content/localization/learning_language.html
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WiXi
the patent makes me feel slightly safer to share the idea.. the open license gives me B.) hope to develop the software (IANAL nor programmer) and A.) a free way to promote "free" uses of the software and resulting texts.. free promotion of the tool wants to cause commercial usage from which i hope to earn back my investment and then invest in something good.. evil?Software should be handled by copyright, not patent. I won't respect anyone's patent claims for software. I will respond with a big "Fuck You" to anyone who tells me I can't write and distribute a sequence of characters because they patented it.
Freedom is free.
Large companies frequently use patent pools and cross-licensing agreements working this way. "We agree to let you use our patents, and you agree to let us use yours". Compensation for a patent license doesn't have to involve money alone, or even at all. If money is all you're willing to offer for a patent license, your contract will naturally have a higher dollar cost than one that includes cross licensing. Cross licensing makes sense when your motivation is primarily defensive (avoid the expense of defending against patent lawsuits) rather than offensive (the patent troll business model). The patent troll angle may be enough motivation to bring some major players into an open-source patent pool.
for a Business Model Patent as well. A 2 for one deal.
Wow, they went to the trouble of getting gene therapy in order to have the text of their patents encoded in their DNA? That's some hard-core entrepeneurship!
Oh, wait, sorry; that's just some dumbass, buzzword-bingo-bound expression that's not yet considered as cliché as "paradigm shift" or "think outside the box." Sorry to spoil the moment.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
"Their motto is 'Free for open source, everyone else pays.'"
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong.
What if Microsoft did this? They hold many thousands of patents -- what if they said "You can use our patents for free in closed proprietary applications, but open source must pay." People would be screaming bloody murder. Software patents are wrong and should be abolished. The fact that a patent is held by a "good" or "less evil" company doesn't make software patents any less wrong.
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The problem is we should be working towards community-developed open source projects, rather than proprietary and commercial products which happen to be available under open source licenses. In many ways, this represents a step back rather than forward.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
is "copyleft" trademarked? what if an organized group confused the public as to the meaning of "copyleft"?.. trademarks are about reputation, which may be less of a product and more of an ongoing process.. less of a noun and more of a verb.. trademarks currently are strongest when they modify nouns, ie this is a google(tm) version of search.. for example, the act of xeroxing (verb) dilutes the xerox(tm) copyright.. google lawyers fret about verbal use of "to google" this or that.. for example, google "barlow+economy+ideas".. so is trademark as sick as copyright and patent? do trademarks need to go verbal to deal with info processes? how do you wanna change trademark?
Exactly. Software moves way too fast to allow BS like patents in a way. Copyright works. Use of trade secrets works as well. But patents are BS wrt. software.
See blackboard software and their patent trolling vs. others. See all the patent trolls vs. Microsoft (like that DirectX patent troll posted last year on slashdot). See RIM vs. patent trolls. Instead of innovation, patents breed FUD in the software world.
If you can patent software bytes, why can't mathematicians patent their theorem? Why is an implementation of a theorem more valued than the theorem in the first place? In many cases where current patents are concerned, the former is much more difficult to arrive at then the latter.
I'm willing to challenge software patent claims just to be among the first ones to pick the fight with the claimants. Can anyone think of any good software patent claims to challenge?
Freedom is free.
The OSI was never about freedom from their very inception as an organization. This guy Rosen either doesn't get it, or he knowingly serves large software patent claimants at the expense of the rest of us.
Freedom is free.
the parent post makes me think there should be a "spam" mod category.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Whichever one they choose, like a dual-licensed GPL project. If you like zero-price and are fine with the open-source conditions, then choose that. If you have proprietary code you don't want to open source, then choose the commercial license.
The problem I see is that it is much harder to tell whether a proprietary project is violating a specific patent. On that note, I've often wondered: since it is generally agreed that every software project, propietary and libre, violates software patents, can't we just call it a wash, and undo this unauthorized invention of the courts?
I would actually really enjoy seeing open source go this route. Years ago when I was first introduced to open source this was actually exactly how I thought it was operating until I was educated more on the matter later on. If used for profit, then the profit should be distributed to help continue the growth of the community. If for free, then any progress made on that code (to the best of my knowledge) is typically distributed, again, to help continue the growth of the community. It seems entirely foolish and far too idealistic for someone to slave over some code for an extended amount of time just to release it and have some other company use it as the infrastructure to their product and watch them make millions while the coder still lives in their parents' basement or whatnot. (I know I know, stereotype, but you get the point). I almost think it should mandatory for programmers of open source to take a business class or something. Anyone who generates their own products (coders, artists, musicians, etc) really need to realize that in addition to creating their item they also need to be *able* to sell themselves, even if they choose not to. One day they made decide that they need to eat.
Apple Computers gets its name from Apple Records. If there had been some sort of cosmic convergence I'd side with the computer company, but in this case, they brought it on themselves. It was a nice bit of homage to the Beatles, but a foolish business choice.
Trademark law was created to benefit consumers. That purpose has changed. From Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks (p. 290):
Trademarks are undergoing the same change as copyright and patent. These began as privileges intended to promote the public good. They have been transformed into property rights for private benefit, at the expense of the public they were originally intended to serve.
Trademarks are often abused to achieve an effect similar to copyright. For example, trademarks can be registered on names from the public domain. IANAL, and I know courts have ruled that this is not the purpose of trademarks, but they are used this way regardless. Want to publish a Conan story in Canada (where Robert E. Howard's works are unambiguously in the public domain)? Go ahead - but don't call it Conan. Or look at the continued abuses of the Olympics to force already-existing businesses to change their names.
Trademarks are used to create monopolies on whole categories of products. I have a young son and recently discovered how effective this is for toys. Toys have gone from being simple products to being cross-promoted product and entertainment lines. You no longer buy your child a toy train - you buy a Thomas the Tank Engine train. Sure, kids love Thomas, so there's some value there. But it pushes out competition and diversity, dominating the whole product category. How can you compete unless you too have a TV show, books, toy trains - the whole bit? One by one, the categories in toy stores are turning into brands. In a Toys R Us I found the "trains" section should simply have been labeled "Thomas and Friends" - because that's virtually all that was there (and boy was it overpriced). Now Disney seems to be trying to do the same thing with Cars.
Kids learn brands at a very young age, and I don't think they're good for kids. Despite my efforts, my son knew about Thomas by age 2. Then he started asking about other products. I taught him the word "logo" because I didn't want him to think "Dairyland" was the word for yoghurt. I want him growing up in a world of trains and cars and music and so on, not of Thomas(TM), Cars(TM), and Apple(TM). I want a chance to teach him what a brand is (and what it is not) before he assimilates them into the kinds of objects that exist in the world. Brands were supposed to enable consumer choice, not narrow the kinds of things we can think about.
You could try to force all users of a FOSS program to improve it by forcing it to remain FOSS forever. But then companies will buy commercially available systems to produce their closed-source stuff, and the FOSS project will NOT benefit from that. Or you could allow a "second license" which provides money to the project which is used to improve the project. The company adds their own stuff into the project but who cares because now the project has more money to improve on its own. Yes, information was meant to be free, but sometimes exchanging free information for good money makes sense too.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
In the video Rosen draws a parallel between using copyright law against itself and using patent law against itself. That seems to be the crux of his argument for using patents in open source software. But for me, the genius of open source licenses like the GPL is that I don't need to involve an intellectual property attorney every time I release new code. Once you include patents in the mix, writing software starts involving the legal leeches. Say, for example, I improve or tweak an OSL licensed software involving the use of some patented technology. Does my improvement violate a patented improvement on the patent? I don't want to worry about this bullshit when writing code. I, for one, would never bother improving this kind of "open source" software.
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You can't use turd against itself without getting some of it on your fingers.
This is a dangerous course for software development. The only thing this type of business model favors is the pocketbook of the original patent holder.
I guess I'll patent "Hello World" (nobody has patented that yet, have they?) and license it out to everyone who ever has or will use it.
We've seen how much grief existing software patents have caused the technology industry, simply because one company's idea comes too close to another that has been patented. Case in point the whole Blackberry/RIM vs. NTP fiasco. Why should I be in violation of a patent and forced to pay millions of dollars just because another company already came up with a software program that does what mine does? Who is going to patent the Word Processor, the Spreadsheet, etc?
I don't care what Rosen says. Protection for software belongs in the copyright arena, NOT the patent arena.
I have tried to keep an open mind for years now, and I have heard all the arguments before. And by now I have also seen the real results. And based on that, my opinion has not changed: software should not be patentable. Period.
Neither the Blackboard case nor the RIM case involved patent trolls. You probably should learn what terms mean before using them.
I patent the alphabet!
I wonder if someone already patented the business process of 'Free for open source, everyone else pays.'
Aside from working for OSI for a while, Rosen is also better known for creating some licenses that weren't exactly free and trying to pass them off as being the real thing (failure; nobody uses them), and generally supporting companies who try to exploit the "open source" label for publicity without actually releasing any free software.
Don't be fooled. He may not be actively opposed to free software, but he's not working for it either. He's just a hanger-on that's trying to profit from it. It's unclear whether it's due to greed or simple ignorance, but his idea of an "open source" business model tends to be "people give us software for free and then we sell it" - not exactly evil, but pretty much missing the point. You know the type: "we'll give you the source, if you change anything you must give it to us, we own all your changes, you can't release it without our approval, and we get to sell it".
Have fun!
And we can all help this effort by not using the word Photoshop as a noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and exclamation. Say "graphics editing software" and "image file". Right: "I have reason to believe that a graphics editor processed this image using editing software." Wrong: "ZOMG! A Photoshopper photoshopped that photoshop!"
I thought this was where Microsoft was heading with the Novell deal etc. By allowing Open Source to use their patents they infect it and find a new and possibly more secure way of getting money out of large companies. Remember Microsoft is promising not to sue independent open source developers (although people running their code are not so lucky.) http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
I cannot condone this kind of "open source" as it involves patents which make me not free to write my own code. That is no kind of freedom at all. I hope the distributions shun this poison.
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I'm not sure you can patent the alphabet. Patent are for methods and process, aren't they? for alphabet, you can have copyright or maybe trademark (thought for trademarking, you have to actually trade something, and it doesn't prevent the use of it for an other product, unless your well known.)
I patent metaphors... I'm sure that fall in the patent box.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
I agree, however, this looks less like spam and more like amanfromMars (theregister.co.uk) wrote it.
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
Thing is, I remember Thomas the Tank Engine from when I was a kid. And I'm 27. It's not like it's some new thing to come along. As far as kids knowing what brands are, I really don't think they do. They know what characters they like. A regular train is boring. A talking train with a smiley face with a bunch of friend trains and a little conductor he talks to is actually interesting to the child. My oldest (other one is only 5 months, so she doesn't recognize much yet) knows who Dora is, all the Sesame Street characters. I don't think that it has really adverse effects on her. She eats yogurt, and doesn't care what name is on the container, as long as it tastes good.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'd rather do a challenge to the "one-click-purchase" Google patent. That has to be one of the silliest patents of all.
Freedom is free.
I like the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it if it had been around when I was a kid. We often borrow it from the library and watch a couple of episodes together before bed. But then when he sees the toys, he wants them too, and the clothes, and so on. If the TV show was just a show, I would be happy. If the toys were just toys, I would be happy too. But they're a big system designed to capture kids.
Research has shown that children discriminate brands from a young age. Like adults, they are seduced by them - but children are too young to understand that. As a parent, I want my child to have the chance to make up his own stories. I don't want him hooked on certain (often inferior, less creative, and more expensive) products simply because of the branding. I don't want Disney to replace the older versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Mother Goose. (Actually, I much don't like Disney at all. I didn't grow up with it. I find it very American in a way that's foreign to my Canadian values. I am not speaking for other Canadians here, or criticizing their choices or those of Americans, but there it is.)
I don't want to tell anyone else how to bring up their kids. But for my child, I would rather see him playing with wooden blocks, Lego bricks, markers and paper, cardboard boxes, old telephones pots from the kitchen. He thinks Thomas is a friendly train. But it's not, it's marketing by a company for profit. Yet he commits emotionally to it. It's too early for him to bypass his own imagination for that of someone else. When he grows older, I want him to understand what brands are, and what they are not. Then if he wants to give his allegiance to Apple or Sony or Nike or whatever that's his choice. For now though, I want him to be free of them.
Trademarks support brands, and brands create and extend monopolies. Toys illustrate this best of all. Because while adults at least understand what brands are, and can make their choices, kids don't understand. They are at the mercy of brands. The problem of marketing to kids is much larger than this, but trademarks are certainly part of the problem. And despite adults' greater ability to make their own choices, they too are subject to brand monopolies.
If he has to use video to explain why patents don't suck, I'll give it a miss. Transcript, anyone?
Get rid of the TV. We do not have one and my five year old daughter is virtually immune to that kind of marketing. Her associations for the Disney brand seem to mildly negative.
What she does no is play with Meccano and Lego, read, play board games, listen to CDs (sometimes reading along with it) and listen to stories on her computer (including podcasts).
How much of that would she do if she had easy entertainment available? yes you can limit time spent on TV and its effects, but why set yourself up for a struggle.
This is excellent advice. We've done the next best thing. There's only one TV in the house, it's in our bedroom, and we only watch DVDs from the library. Our son's exposure to Disney etc. comes from daycare, hand-me-down clothes, and from gifts from friends (though I try to filter out the Disney), so it's not great, but it's more than I had hoped.
Incidentally, we didn't get rid of cable for him - we did it for ourselves. We found we weren't watching it. We watch want we want to, when we want to, and we read. I think we're much happier, not least because we don't see the travesty that is television news.
When you hear Apple and music, whom do you think of now?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The only way to guarantee convergence towards freedom, as well as allow unlimited incremental innovation, is to provide an instrument that causes you, like for GPL, keep the source free, to avoid stealing (as is done with GPL violations). In our case we are implementing a general business model Wish-IT® which will converge towards patent free products, that can be built upon by using incremental innovation for all future. To allow patents on products keeps the dystopia status quo, efficiently counteracting free competition. Our business model encourages competition.
There are plenty of business models whose gradient can be used, both to generate profit for the provider, as well as allow consumers to be part of the innovation process. Our model Wish-IT model is one of these, utilizing AI-methods to enable the consumer to be part of the innovation, acceptance, at least partial development and price tagging of the product. However, to guarantee that competition can be withheld in our case, the business model and the method itself is patented.
I spoke about this at an IP-symposium in Amsterdam 2005, where the title of my speach was: A patented method to fix the patent system. This implies that not all business method patents are evil. Some may benefit the society and increase competition, as I express in the brief abstract (all abstracts from meeting).
We have come quite far, although we need investors. If you know someone who want to be part of a global project for creating GPL like products. Get in touch. Also if you want to discuss more in details why this is beneficial both for the society, the companies involved and all consumers, get in touch!
Roland Orre, IT-researcher, consultant and entrepreneurAfter significant research into the facts around the effects of TV on kids, I concluded that it was not a detriment. And I found that our sons had the best vocabulary, by far, of anyone in their class.
I don't think you have to get rid of the TV. Just get good at limiting it. There's no reason that you have to watch television news just because they broadcast it. I very rarely watch the news. And when I do, it's the morning news, which consists of weather, traffic (I don't drive so I ignore this), the stock market prices, and a couple advertisements in the form of stories for local businesses. My kids watch about 30 minutes of TV a day. Some days there's no TV at all, not because think they've had too much, but just because they have other things they enjoy doing more.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This is just as sad as Apple using blue screens as Windows icons... This will earn them nothing but disrespect and will damage the face of FOSS.
*Novell added to V!NCENT's boycott list*
Here be signatures
Even though Rosen and Popowich do not intend to sue free software
developers for patent infringement, their plans nonetheless put us in
danger.
Software patents are the greatest danger to free software developers
and users -- and we are too few to win their abolition alone. But we
are not in this danger alone. Software patents also threaten the
developers and users of proprietary software, and the developers and
users of custom software. Everyone involved with software is in the
same boat with us, and we need to ask them to join with us to oppose
software patents.
That is why all the campaigns to prevent or abolish software patents
-- from the League for Programming Freedom to FFII to End Software
Patents -- try to make common cause for all software developers on
this crucial issue. With our combined strength, we sometimes win.
Rosen and Popowich's "business model" would undermine this common
cause against patents. That is shortsighted and dangerous. If we are
to argue convincingly against the "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory"
patent licenses, that discriminate unreasonably against free software,
our own actions must not legitimize the practice of using patents to
demand money from software developers and users.
Rosen and Popowich are in the same boat with the rest of us. But
instead of helping everyone escape, they plan to cut spears from the
wood of the hull to threaten some of the other passengers. This is
dangerous for everyone in the boat.
We need to pull together if we want to get out of this. So don't use
any "business model" based on software patents. Support the End Software
Patents campaign (EndSoftwarePatents.org).
Posted on behalf of Richard M. Stallman (rms@gnu.org).
I find very little reason to watch "news" on TV unless it's amusing for some reason, or I am getting something "live" and interesting.
Newsreaders read out news much slower than I can read a webpage. So even after all the scrolling text etc it's still not very efficient when it comes to getting news. And, the analysis is usually either nonexistent or crap.