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."
Yeah, but then it would probably be impossible to enforce their patent pool since the BSD/MIT licenses don't require you to even acknowledge that you've combined their code into a proprietary product.
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.
The MPEG group and the other douche bags they hang with are the most anti open source group there is. Am I ever going to play Blu-ray movies on my Linux computer? Not likely.
It really seems to me that in common use "Open Source" *does* now mean you are free to do whatever you want with the source. Just being able to *look* at the source is not called Open Source, it is probably best to call it "published source code" or "the source code is available for you to look at".
"Free Software" means the enforced-freeness of the GPL, which is a subset of Open Source.
So for most uses this is neither Open Source or Free Software.
Plain English, do you speak it?
"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted"
Or did I miss the part where they said "but we withhold the right to sue you for inducement to infringe if you try the former, and actual infringement for the latter"?
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.