Slashdot Mirror
Working Toward a Patent-Agnostic Open Source License
Glyn Moody writes "Are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source license? That's the question posed by a new license that is being submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for review. The MPEG Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) standard as open source, but it also wants to be able to sell patent licenses. If it can't, it might not make the implementation open source; but if it does, it might undermine the fight against software patent proliferation."
It's just a way of trying to make software patents more valid.
I would say that any patent that lacks hardware (chemical compound or physical device) wouldn't be valid.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Does this mean that the source code would be freely available, but that you couldn't use it without paying them? I skimmed the artical and linked pages, but can't figure out what this would actually mean.
They should use the BSD or MIT licenses if they're more interested in releasing code than promoting public policy. It would provide the key functionality they claim to need without dragging their whole process through the muck and mire.
Everybody should be able to use, say, H.264 and AAC if your software only does playback.
To record/create files, you would need a license.
What is the motive behind this new license? To cherry pick a few of the ideals of Open Source Software (OSS)?
... I don't mind more licenses and I think the MPL was a step in the right direction but not perfect. Either way, observers can be sure of one thing, there are at least some aspects of open source that appeal very much to a lot of people. It will be interesting to see what results from this endeavor.
It sounds like, from the license, that they want the openness of many eyes reviewing and improving the code with derivative work while at the same time licensing that idea to other companies. Which, frankly, I cannot comprehend as any company would just opt for the open source community code to integrate into their product than pay the patent holder to roll their own. Or are they planning on charging you for the "open source" version like normal software? If so, how is that any difference from a commercial license modified so that you receive the code to review with the product?
I mean, I'm happy for them to do whatever they feel like
My work here is dung.
Don't use it. Its pretty simple folks. If you want to fight against software patents you will:
1. Boycott companies that actively engage in patent litigation (Against open source doubly)
2. Tell all your friends to stop using said companies products. Tell them why its bad for you in the end, and tell them alternative products / technologies that aren't stifling external creativity
3. Write a well worded letter to said company and detail why you have qualms with them. Make special note in the letter to outline:
- Your grievances
- How many friends you've convinced to stop using their product
- Alternative products / technologies that don't do whatever your grievance is
- Solutions - How to turn your utter bile hatred in said company into a customer again
Pointing out that you like their products but still refuse to respect their behaviour will make sure to whomever reads the letter that your hatred of their company is not out of some bias, but based purely on said behaviour.
Bye!
Looks like it:
What I don't understand is what the point is of making something open source if you're only allowed to use it as a black box. Are they expecting people to licence the patent and then distribute the reference implementation? But if they're paying for the patent why not bundle a copyright licence in with it? And why the restrictions? Surely a patent only prevents you selling or importing infringing products, so the "patent covenant" isn't actually giving you anything you didn't already have?
Our project (FreeSWITCH) uses the MPL for the main application and BSD for satellite libraries that we create that can be used by other projects etc.
Once you decide to have open source code, it's more logical to stick with the fact that at least the core code is FREE and come up with ways to develop a product on top of it if you want to have something to sell. Otherwise it sounds like an "open source tax" and businesses do not like uncertainty. If they choose to use a code base they need to know it will always be available.
Published source code is not the same as "open" source code.
They're trying to confuse the issue so they can have it both ways - look like a good corporate citizen by donating to the community, but making us pay for the donation.
...that "agnostic" is the wrong word in this context. Agnostics believe that neither the existence nor the non-existence of God can be proven.
The word you wanted is probably "apathetic," which means "doesn't care."
Yes, I know I am being a Nazi. But honestly, would it KILL you to learn what these words mean before you use post them on a widely read public forum?
The Motion Picture Experts Group Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new Motion Picture Experts Group eXtensible Middleware standard. Are we running out of sane acronyms? More at 11.
What they want to do is not in the spirit of open source. Just post the source code with a proprietary shared source license the same way Microsoft and others do. That way they have the source code available for review but no one is allowed to use it without paying them. Which is exactly what they want.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
It's funny to me that the product/service acronym is MXM because jussssst b4 is saw that, i saw the slashdot dating notice:
Slashdot Dating
Other Slashdot Users are Nearby Meet and date on Geek 2 Geek
www.Gk2gk.com
So, my mind quickly saw G2G 4 M4M... lol.... THAT's why /. is so... pent upp, hehehe... some guys need to get out more often... hang out in corn fields in Iowa... keep an eye out for the errant/itenerant Klingon that might arrive fleeing from the Xindi or the Orion Syndicate...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Hand over your patents or GTFO!
I don't know whether I believe in imaginary property or not!
From the email:
Well, maybe someone is trying to argue that other OSI licenses also don't promise anything regarding royalty-free patent-licenses. But this is because licenses are predominantly about the author's copyright and not about the patents. However if the text of this licenses explicitely deals with patents and uses them to restrict users rights, then it formally violates already item 1 of the Open Source Definition.
Stallman's answer comes to mind
I think it boils down to this. The open source community can feel free to contribute code and documentation to our project. But we will feel free to keep you from being able to run it on an open source platform and we have the force of patents to stop you. If you want to fork the code we just drop the patent bomb.
Or, in a less Orwellian take: the license gives licensed implementers a common, working starting point for their products. They don't have to start from scratch, and everyone's not re-inventing the wheel. Everyone ships the same libmxm.so or MXM.DLL, and any bug fixes can be shared as well. This would also help interoperability.
The "open-sourceness" is aimed towards licensees, and not the general public: the audience for the library is not J. Random Hacker browsing Source Forge or the FreeBSD Portss collection.
They want to publish the source code, but not grant the patent license. Now, from a developer's perspective, this can be interpreted as follows. If you aren't willing to break the law, then this means that to use the software you need the patent license. Effectively the patent has been statically linked as a kind of binary to your binary. However, there's a catch. If a linked object were software, you could develop a replacement and release that as free software. So that means that even if software can only work when linked against a certain non-free library, it can still be free (without the library) and perhaps a replacement can be developped that makes the combination free as well. Linking against operating system and runtime libraries would be an example. However if the linked object is a patent, this is generally not possible, because usually there is no way to replace it. The code contains due to its implementation a reference to the specific patent that cannot be removed. And this is why I hope that no one will ever mistake such a source code without patent license for a free license, because it manifestly isn't. Suppose it were possible (it de natura isn't, thankfully) to embed a non-removable call to a specific version of a non-free library in code... then the GPL and similar licenses would contain clauses disallowing that as well.
Sick 'em Jen-Hsun Huang.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
That renders the patents nearly irrelevant, completely so for general purpose computers. There's nothing to prevent a commercial exploiter from distributing the source code to their customers, along with a compiler and a one-step process for compiling it. Nor for any Linux distro to do essentially the same -- create an "mpeg-mxm" package which requires mpeg-mxm-source and gcc and automagically compiles the package. Even Apple and Microsoft could do it. I'm not sure why this would be acceptable to the MPEG group. There simply is no way to effectively control "object code" without also controlling source code. Not only can source code be translated into object code, it can be executed directly by an interpreter. Then what is your patent doing? As for the dodge of claiming "a machine-readable medium containing the instructions to execute this nonpatentable algorithm"... I wonder if they've realized that they've claimed any computer-readable medium containing the patent description itself...
Well said. That about sums it up for me.
"The MPEG Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) standard as open source, but it also wants to be able to sell patent licenses."
There must be more to it than this because there is an easy solution for this one.
Put the code under the AGPL or GPL, Grant a free patent license to those using the Free stuff and charge tpatent fees to those who want a non-Free license to the code.
So, if they develop their own non-Free code and the patent covers it, they pay once.
If they want a non-Free license to the code as well then they pay twice.
(Note, I am not discussing the "rightness" of software patents here. Just commenting on the lack of a problem as stated with how things seem to have been going on lately.)
My guess is what is really meant is that they desire to obtain the "Good Vibes" that go along with being Open Source Software or Free Software without actually giving people the intended benefits. I do guess wrong with reasonable frequency so I will be interested to see how this plays out. (Hopefully there will be no sellouts from the community side of things.)
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
AT&T vs Microsoft puts contributory infringement to bed ... but AFAICS distributing source code can still be construed as inducement to infringe (which wasn't relevant in the AT&T vs Microsoft case because it dealt with a different set of laws on exports, to a country where the patent wasn't valid in the first place).
That's cute, so when they slip up and say ideas like everyone else they can say "but I was talking about abstract ideas, and you were not". The whole "you can't patent ideas" thing is just a little semantic diversion, used by idiots who don't recognise it as such and people who are disingenuous.
Somewhere there are lawyers sitting around a bottle of scotch thinking up ways to use words for the exact opposite of what they mean. They are the Drunken Idiot Attorney Forum (DIAF) working group. Clearly this license is a draft version of their proposal for an international Patented Open Software (POS) standard to be pushed through the ISO fast track process next year despite the determined opposition of just about everybody involved.
Fortunately for all of us this endeavor violates at least three Microsoft business process patents.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A fair compromise would be to license the software in such a way that it sets a flat price on the licensing of the software OR limits the number of times the patent may be used to collect licensing fees before entering public domain
Does this mean that the source code would be freely available, but that you couldn't use it without paying them? I skimmed the artical and linked pages, but can't figure out what this would actually mean.
TFA says that it includes a patent covenant not to sue two classes of people: Those distributing only the source, and those compiling for 'internal purposes' only.
It seems to me that the second case would handle e.g. Linux users that compile and run the code on their machine, and use it to view content. The first case is less clear, it seems that it might be intended to cover people 'working' with the code, and that might possibly extend to Linux distros that distribute the code (but not binaries) to their users (who can then compile it).
Not sure if it's achieved, but the goal seems to be to sell patent licenses to big corporations that make lots of money off of this sort of thing, while not bothering with individuals and hobbyists.
Well, I guess to the extent that murdering somebody is considered "transforming matter" under Bilski, you could patent the murder process.
I don't think you can get a patent granted for something which is intrinsically illegal, such as committing murder. However, you might be able to patent a method and apparatus for killing a human, provided it is presented as a solution for the task of lawful killing (such as carrying out a death sentence given by a competent court or court-martial). However, we humans are an inventive and dastardly lot, so it might take real creativity to come up with a killing method which is not already in the public domain.
Anyway, if someone were infringing my patent by deliberately killing people, I'd be very wary of taking them on in any merely legal fashion.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Just say NO! to software patents. As a member of the FSF I am in total opposition to allowing patent-encumbered licenses into the system. There is no "compromise" to this principal that in my opinion would be appropriate. I hope that the FSF rejects this attempt to subvert the entire GPL, and will actively encourage it to do so.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Well, the OSI already accepted MicroSoft's license, which had nothing special going for it except that it had the Microsoft name on it. This right after saying that they were trying to reduce the number of licenses that they considered valid, because of excessive duplication.
The OSI has long stopped being a touchstone, and is now only an indicator. If the OSI rejects it, you don't need to even consider it, but their acceptance doesn't mean anything. You've got to either consider each license separately, or only use licenses that you have already verified.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But releasing code that's known to be covered under a valid patent would undermine the spirit of open source no matter what license you use.
No doubt. But the only reason for them NOT using the MIT/BSD style license would be if they wanted to add more restrictions than just the patent. So I suspect the patents aren't the only issue... they don't just want to release with an OS license plus a patent, they want something else as well.
They don't have the advertising clause in there any more, but the acknowledgment clause is still intact. Don't feel bad, there's been lots of people who've confused BSDL with public domain and ripped off the BSDL and replaced it with something like the GPL and tripped over that one.
We'll make our own, we don't need your patent licenses or your code, thanks.
Good luck licensing something which has already been made obsolete by so many other formats. mp3 is a thing of the past.
There are other players and encoders which you threatened action over in the past so, what's changed? Now you want to release the source AND be able to sue people for using it without a license? Ummm... I don't think so.
Thanks, but no thanks. GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Mmmmmm, Microsoft's license had succinctness going for it, and a once-sentence change from reciprocal to public. It's basically Mozilla-on-one-page, which is an achievement.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Sorry, but why the fuck do you think we would ever Ever EvEr eVeR EVER accept this license? Just because some loony-bins follow our process and submit a license doesn't mean it has a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted. YES, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, we have to have rules that apply to all comers, and we're not permitted to arbitrarily pick and choose between who we talk to and who we don't. But equally true is that THIS LICENSE VIOLATES OSD #7, every day: morning, noon or night, sun or rain, new or full moon.
Sheesh. Give us some credit for not being COMPLETELY STUPID FUCKERS.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Because people with bad intentions have a habit of lobbying and bribing continually, until the good guys slip and forget to vote the idea down or whatever. As the saying goes, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Or, in this case, all it takes for good to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That'll be the day.