European Parliament To Exclude Free Software With FRAND

First time submitter jan.van.gent writes "The European Parliament is on the verge of adopting a directive reforming standards, reform which would introduce FRAND patent licensing terms, an undefined term which has been seen as a direct attack on the fundamental principles of Free and Open Source software. The Business Software Alliance has been very active trying to get FRAND terms into the directive."

Comments

Trying to figure out who the good guys are

[Anonymous Coward]

This is confusing. It seems to go like this:

General consensus: Some "standards" are being derailed by patent holders who make unreasonable demands.
Euros: We'll pass legislation that the demands have to be reasonable.
FSF: No! Because even so-called reasonable demands exclude FOSS, hence, they aren't really "reasonable".
Euros: But half a loaf of bread...
FSF: No! Give us the whole damn loaf, or nothing!

Personally I'd be happy to get half a loaf, and then allow for others to keep fighting for the other half.

Re:Trying to figure out who the good guys are

[king neckbeard]

Why? What does that solve, and how is that not going to be worse that the thing it solves? And that doesn't even solve the "problem". GSM, for example, is a standard that has patents on physical hardware. Why is software so special that it should be exempt from patents altogether?

Software is special because it's purely mathematical, but we should try to eventually rid ourselves of copyright and patents altogether as well. It will not be worse because patents, especially software patents, do not result in a net social benefit, so the elimination of them would result in no longer having a hindrance.

That would make no sense. For something like H.264 or GSM, Google could just pay a one time fee for each standard, and all of a sudden every Chrome user gets H.264 and every Motorola phone gets GSM, for no additional charge in perpetuity?

The various patent holders only invented the invention once, so just getting paid once is fine as well. However, in this scenario, I'm saying that this is one option available. Google might find it better to pay a smaller royalty over time than a one time lump sum.

It works fantastically. If someone wants to write software that says you can't use patented technologies, *THAT PERSON* is the one who's causing the issue. And that is an ideological stance that is counter to reality.

Then practically all people that write software are 'causing issues', because it's quite difficult to write non-trivial software that doesn't infringe on a patent. We're just fortunate in that most of the time, the patent holder is unaware of this fact.

The simple fact is that FRAND works just fine. That's reality. Pretending like it's some sort of assault on freedom, or free software, is ass backwards.

If by works just fine, you mean helps to uphold rent seeking behavior, then sure. It's quite annoying that the standard often used for 'works just fine' is 'hasn't completely halted progress.'

Re:Trying to figure out who the good guys are

[Skuto]

I think you really need to read up on what free software is. Paying for a patent license is completely incompatible with making your software free, because the freedom (the patent license) cannot be passed on. That's why the GPL2 is incompatible with it and why the GPL3 even aggressively retaliates against it.

That's also why Mozilla, even though they can easily afford to pay the H264 license for all Firefox users, has taken an "over my dead body" stance on it. If they include H264, it is no longer free software, and things like Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Ten-Four etc must cease to exist or are forced to be half-assed versions.

You can contrast this with Chrome, where Google doesn't give a shit that the open source version (Chromium) is crippled compared to the closed source one. But even they have stated that they'd like to get rid of the split. But they can't. Why?

Because patents.

Re:What is so unfair about "fair?"

[betterunixthanunix]

There is nothing in FRAND, that I can see, that prohibits open source software or other open IP

There most certainly is; from the GPL:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License

if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.

How can I have the freedom to redistribute my software at no cost (which is one of the freedoms you have with free software) if I have to pay royalties to some standards body in order to do so, and force anyone who helps in that redistribution (i.e. mirrors, participants in a P2P networks, etc.) to do so?