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."

Comments

MIT/BSD licenses

[argent]

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.

Re:What does it mean?

[Dwonis]

The open source definition is a set of 10 criteria that "distribution terms" (i.e. a copyright license) must meet to be legitimately called "open source". The problem is that, if you're dishonest (and many people are), you can still use patent law or other means to render most of those criteria moot while still nominally meeting them.

On the other hand, FSF's free software definition only deals with the necessary results of those rules, rather than the rules themselves. It doesn't matter whether somebody's lawyers have figured out a clever way to cover all the "open source" checkboxes, unless you have the actual, meaningful freedoms to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute a program (including improved versions) to anyone for any purpose at any price, then the program is not free software.

The FSF has a fairly decent (and reasonably fair) comparison of "free software" vs "open source", entitled Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software

Re:wrong word in article title

[Mr. Slippery]

Agnostics believe that neither the existence nor the non-existence of God can be proven.

"Agnostic" comes from roots meaning "not knowing", but its use in the sense of "not having an opinion about" is well-established.

But honestly, would it KILL you to learn what these words mean before you use post them on a widely read public forum?

Would it kill you to check a dictionary before trying to go all vocabulary-Nazi on someone? :-)