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Google WebM Calls "Open Source" Into Question
snydeq writes "As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the 'open source' brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of 'open source' as we know it, Savio Rodrigues writes. Witness WebM, which Google has positioned as an open alternative to H.264. After examining the software license, some in the open source community have questioned whether WebM should be classified as open source software. Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD — the 'gold standard' by which many government and business open source policies are defined. Moreover, when prodded for OSI review, Google required that the OSI agree to 'changes to how OSI does licenses' as a precursor to submitting a license for OSI review and approval. 'When Google, one of the largest supporters of open source, goes out and purposefully circumvents the OSI, what signal does this send to other vendors? How important is using an OSI-approved license likely to be in the future if other vendors follow Google's lead?'"
An anonymous reader adds: "It turns out that libvpx, Google's VP8 library, isn't compatible with the GPLv2. Google is apparently aware of the problem and working on a solution.
You don't need the OSI to tell you what is open source and what isn't. Read the OSD and the WebM license and see for yourself.
Note that WebM is, however, FSF-approved Free Software.
The FSF is rather more active than the OSI, and is unlikely to, e.g., get its corporate registration suspended just because they were too arse-disabled to get their paperwork in.
We do need some sort of organisation like the OSI, perhaps even the OSI itself. But I'm entirely unsurprised someone would consider the present OSI just not to have its shit together enough to be taken seriously.
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Microsoft has a "shared source" thing where they will show you the source code for reference purposes (Wikipedia says for viewing Microsoft classes while debugging) but you can't redistribute it. Definitely not open source.
Only a complete idiot would ignore how compatible a license is with other open source licenses. I can in two lines create an open source license that is totally open and totally useless. Watch:
Totally incompatible license v1.0
"You're free to use this code for anything without restriction if any and all code in derivatives is licensed under the Totally incompatible license v1.0"
This obviously meets every definition of the OSI, but it's not compatible with anything, not even the BSD license. It's utterly useless unless you want the whole universe to relicense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It seems very clear that Google is trying to support open standards and technologies. Different people are going back and forth over licenses and procedures. Everyone seems to be acting in good faith. And there's no reason to believe that it won't all get worked out.
The language in the /. article almost makes it sound like Google is trying to do something like "Embrace and Extend". I just don't think that's what's going on.
If we can move to a place where most video is managed with open technologies, it will be very good for everyone. I'm grateful to the companies who get it, and to people who are trying to figure out the best way to do it. And I don't think the fact that there are small differences of opinion among those folks is a good reason to get upset.
A "BSD" license is open.
Uhm, haven't you just redefined GPL?
This sounds a lot less like 'google calls open source into question' and more 'google calls OSI into question'. I am not immediately seeing anything in this license that makes it sound non-OSS, all it seems to be lacking is the rubber stamp of a particular group within OSS, which is not the same thing. Especially since google's complaints about OSI do not seem to be related to software but instead to process.
I am not a lawyer. Here's the gist. the license is not compatible with:
GPL, GPL2, LGPL2
compatible with:
BSD, MIT
likely compatible with:
Apache, CDDL, Mozilla
unlikely compatible with:
GPL3
This all boils down to the patent clause at the end. It makes further restrictions upon distribution. They are worded in a way that looks to be compatible with Apache and the like, but someone from the FSF should really step in and announce if the two different patent clauses are compatible in GPL3 and WebM license.
That's all that really matters to most, it is not an OSI approved license, since it has not been submitted. That matters to some organizations in choosing a license.
So, every product that claims to be 'green' is equally green for you?
You don't think it would be useful to have some help in determining which ones adhere to practices that are generally considered to be good (or at least, not so bad) for the environment?
I personally am not willing to trust that every claim of green, or open, or whatever is equal, but I don't have time to investigate these things myself, so I appreciate the help of organizations that will help me sort these things out.
I'm not looking for companies or products claiming these titles to be perfect, but without some scrutiny these claims will become meaningless and we won't even know the difference.
Well, here is what Google was concerned about:
1) We will want a label explicitly deterring the use of the license.
2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We
are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
3) We need to know OSI's current corporate status. I heard that osi was a
california corporation again, but I would like to know, from the group, that
this is true for 2010 and that there aren't any issues there.
So, they want the OSI to be more open, and they want to discourage the use of the WebM license by others to prevent license sprawl, and they want to verify OSI's corporate status.
Anyone else have a problem with these changes? They seem help everyone.
Use a brand new license and people are right to be suspicous.
Licenses are like reading someone else's source code. They're bastard cousins of contracts
and contracts are complicated twisted things specifically engineered to try and screw the
other guy. This is a reason to avoid license proliferation and a reason to stick to what
is well understood. Legal language has consequences.
So the obvious question is why has Google chosen to add to the mix or start from scratch.
What are they up to? What is the motivation that already isn't encapsulated in one of the
pre-existing licenses.
A new license needs to be vetted just like any other legal language.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
* Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Google's license for this software is just an approved BSD license + a narrow patent license. If it'd be open source without the patent license, I'm not at all sure why it wouldn't be open source with an added patent license which is along the spirit of the original license.
This controversy is STUPID. Next we'll hear bitter complaints about how PostgreSQL's not "open source."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
OSI didn't ask for any of this.
Someone who wanted to start developing stuff on top of the library (who happens to be esr) asked for this.
Then some things were said, like "well we're not ready yet" but in a hurried and somewhat non-diplomatic manner.
Then the whole thing blew up just enough for the lid to leave the teapot by about a quarter of an inch before it settled back down.
There is no there there.
That's actually a much older use of the term open source in the intelligence community. "Open source intelligence" means getting your intelligence from open, i.e. public, sources. It's used in intelligence predates the "coining" of the term for use with software. [citation needed.]
I much prefer just calling free and "open source" software, because without the source code, it isn't really "soft" ware, is it? Well, sure, you can hack the binaries, but that isn't as useful.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Were we would be?
We would have no access to source, companies would feel free to use works with no giving back to the source and we would have a massive tragedy of the commons. Yeah, that sounds great.
Whatever the merits of this particular disagreement, the term "open source" is definitely getting diluted in the same way that "organic" and "innovative" have been diluted. I went to a symposium in LA last year about the governor's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. There was quite a mix of people there -- teachers, education bureaucrats, open-source software types, authors of free books, people from hardware companies, and people from traditional textbook publishing houses. Everyone was using "open source" like it was magic pixie dust, sprinkling it on everything to make it seem shinier and better. Pearson's rep referred to the consumable workbook it submitted as "free and open-source" -- actually it's just a PDF file that you can download and print, but that you can't redistribute, modify, etc. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's rep, when questioned about DRM, said that her company was committed to DRM, and envisioned its DRM'd materials being mixed and matched with open-source ones. Both said that they wanted to be service providers (think Red Hat), rather than just content providers (a la Microsoft) -- but, hey, they produce really great content, too. Apple and Dell's reps argued for open formats such as XML.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that people are confused about applying the term to anything other than computer software. When I've mentioned here on slashdot that I was the author of some open-source books, I've sometimes gotten reactions amounting to, "You're an idiot. You don't even know what open source means." This despite the fact that the books are under a GPL-style copyleft license (CC-BY-SA, same as Wikipedia) and their source code (written in a programming language called LaTeX) is openly available and free for redistribution and modification under that license. It sounds like there's similar confusion here because people aren't distinguishing clearly between the issue of WebM as an open format and the implementation of WebM in open-source software. Who the heck cares whether google's reference implementation is open source, as long as the format is openly defined and usable without paying patent royalties? The first implementations of html by NCSA weren't open source according to the modern meaning of the term, but html was certainly an open format.
Find free books.
Actually, quite many licenses are GPL-compatible without being the GPL. They tried very hard in the GPLv3 to make more licenses compatible by letting you add various bits:
a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or
e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or
f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.
But yes, ultimately the GPL says "no more restrictions". It doesn't matter if those restrictions are a good idea or not, if noone thought to include them in the license text they're not permitted.
Oddly enough, if I look at the GPLv3 under patents there's one word I'm not seeing here:
"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."
The word I don't see is "irrevocable". Does this mean Google's patent termination clause is GPLv3-compatible? Good question indeed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't care if Google's VP8 library is not strictly speaking open source (or even proprietary), just as long as the WebM format is described in a precise way in a public document, with no patents forbiding me to implement a codec.
The problem is, given current US intellectual property laws, no one can say for certain that there as "no patents forbidding me to implement a codec". That is up to the legal process. Active people in the IP space say that all modern digital video compression methods are probably covered by someone's patent. You could hire your own lawyer to do due diligence to try to see if there are any patents applicable (and perhaps Google did this), but there could be hundreds of thousands of broadly worded patents to examine, and it isn't a 100% certain thing. And maybe a patent troll would come after you, or maybe not, and maybe you'd win in court, or maybe not, or maybe you'd just pay them off to go home.
I personally feel that there should be a method where ANSI-recognized standards have a "patent clearing" period. Perhaps all IP holders get 1-2 years after publishing of a standard by an ANSI-certified standard development organization, you either have to step up and register that your patent is relevant to the standard or you can not claim IP violation by the use of that standard.
I know the free/open software world would love patent-free audio/video compression, but those of us in the professional video industry would just like to know whose patents we might be using and how much it might cost us when we use a standard like H.264. I can tell you that the trolls keep coming for video compression standards over 10 years old, even today!
Is this a library Google themselves have written? Why not just open it up and make it compatible with the GPL version in question? If they want to call it open source isn't that the easiest and fastest way to solve it? Do no evil, not do less evil
*DrugCheese rants*