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European Commission Support of FRAND Licenses Hurts Open Standards
jrepin writes "While the UK has seen the light, the EU has actually gone backwards on open standards in recent times. The original European Interoperability Framework required royalty-free licensing, but what was doubtless a pretty intense wave of lobbying in Brussels overturned that, and EIF v2 ended up pushing FRAND, which effectively locks out open source — the whole point of the exercise. Shamefully, some parts of the European Commission are still attacking open source."
Many European citizens still think Europe will bring more democracy but it mostly brings more power to corporate lobbies.
Whats the betting that the rich closed source US software venders that managed to secretly get this through
pay either no tax or just a gesture contribution like starbucks etc yet somehow sell billions of pounds/euros/dollors worth
of mostly crap software into the EU, So sell here then pay tax here!, As for patents on software in general these MUST
be abolished either completly OR have a very short life say 2 years with no extensions.
As for copyrights thats another area that desperatly needs to be re-thought.
According to the article, there are [still] no software patents in the EU. So theoretically, any FRAND claims of software patents should be ignored. Of course, software patent holders never say "these are software patents." They just say "patents." It'll be interesting how initial claims of this sort will work out.
The author starts with the assertion that because he saw the promos for the workshop "only" weeks beforehand, it was therefore a secret plot :
... organise something in the shadows, so that the open source world would be caught hopping. The fact that I only heard about it a few weeks beforehand ... shows how quiet the Commission kept about this. This secrecy ..."
He knew about weeks ahead of time, yet claims a shadowy plot to keep the workshop secret, then his logic only gets worse from there. Triple tinfoil hat for that author.
He says the panel was rigged, but it includes the founder of FSF Europe and a FSF attorney as well as representatives from specific open source projects/products like PloneGov and Kolab.
FRAND patents include per-unit license fees.
How do you pay those on a product you want freely copied by as many people as possible?
I'm glad we are able to be pool our resources to be represented by corporations like the Free Software Foundation, which had two representatives speaking at the workshop. I'm also glad the Mozilla Foundation Incorporated (Firefox) has a voice, as does kernel.org, a California corporation.
Given Red Hat Inc.'s investment of BIILIONS of dollars toward OSS investment, I think that corporation also deserves a voice. Why exactly should people who invest billions and hire thousands of people NOT be allowed to speak out about government policies that put all of those jobs at risk? Why should we NOT be allowed to express our views by donating to FSF and sending FSF representatives on our behalf?
The author starts with the premise that it's a shadowy, secret plot, evidenced by the fact he saw the promos for the workshop only WEEKS in advance. I know I always advertise MY secret plots weeks in advance of sitting down to discuss them. He then proceeds to say that the panel, including two representatives from the Free Software Foundation Europe, was a bunch of anti- Free Software shills. The FSF is against free software? Really? Triple tinfoil hat territory.
No, there's nothing wrong with F/OSS software. FRAND is simply incompatible with F/OSS due to its nature of burdening arbitrary "methods" with monetary fees.
Imposing mandatory royalties on standards makes it impossible to comply with the standard in FOSS projects. You end up with patent holders capable of dictating who can and cannot use the software. That defeats the purpose of FOSS, particularly the stuff that falls under licenses like the GPLv2 and GPLv3.
This is you simply being a troll. Stick to white knighting for Apple.
Because they are outnumbered by about 50 to one by the supermegacorps and the lobbyists working for supermegacorp, who can outspend them something like 100 times over when it comes to buying politicians?
I mean you have exactly ONE, and only one, billion dollar corp and they are just barely over the billion dollar mark. Now look at how much Apple and the big media corps have by way of comparison and then realize thanks to all the tax dodges you are only looking at probably a third of how much they REALLY have. You think kernel.org, Moz,and RH along with the FSF can stand in the room with those guys and not get outbid by several orders of magnitude?
The reasons corps shouldn't be allowed to "speak" with money is because their "speech" quickly drowns out the people. it is SUPPOSED to be one man one vote but with corps being allowed to be treated as people suddenly some people are simply worth more and therefor better than everybody else, and that is just fucked up. Just because you can name a couple of corps that aren't complete douchebags doesn't magically tip the scales in favor of corps, because for every one FSF you have a dozen Goldman Sachs and *.AAs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Were you trying to make a point here?
And if the per-unit license fees are non-zero, who pays for the patent license? Who gets sued by the patent holder?
Imposing mandatory royalties on standards makes it impossible to comply with the standard in FOSS projects. You end up with patent holders capable of dictating who can and cannot use the software.
That's incorrect. The ND of FRAND is for non-discriminatory. Everyone can use it, so long as they pay.
Again there is nothing intrinsic to open source that means no cost. If the OSS community has munged those two dissimilar things together, then that's how it's broken.
This is you simply being a troll.
No, it's me pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Click on the list of presenters. It includes the founder of FSF E, a lawyer from FSF E, and representatives from open source projects.
Why should the FSF spend its time working out how to co-exist with something that they object to?
Ok so opposition to software patents == piracy now?
This makes the assumption that the patent is valid and actually provides use. Never mind all the crap patents used by patent trolls, ones that get invalidated after long court battles. Never mind patents that are violated without even being aware of it.
Putting patent "methods" into standards is something good exclusively for proprietary software vendors as a way to exclude FOSS solutions.
And, quite obviously, opposed to Free Software. It's pretty obvious.
You also are defending the status quo. Unsurprisingly, there are people who disagree with it.
That's not at all what is happening here. This is you trying to paint FOSS developers in a bad light and stump for the pro-patent status quo.
Where'd all the pro-software-patent types come from?
What if I infringed on the patent without realizing it? What if the patent is part of a critical standard? What if, a few years down the line and millions of dollars later, the patent is invalidated? What have we gained, except to make some lawyers richer?
Like the EOLAS patents? The patents trotted around by trolls?
Bullshit. It's entirely possible to get patents on things that have no business being patented.
The problem is what you say AND the fact that our patent system is utterly broken.
Artificial burdens. At this point software patents don't exist in the EU and hopefully they never will. Of course, if you think that insisting upon the distribution model the GPL (or any FOSS license) allows is a flaw, then you're pretty much anti-FOSS and should just admit it.
Methinks you've no idea of what you're talking about. Only the most uninformed American, British and Continental European could possibly have anything to say about EU democracy -- and that would be if, and only if, they followed Anglo-Saxon news.
Get real. Seriously.
The parliament is elected in very much the same way as the US congress is. The EC officials are suggested by elected heads of state, and must be approved by the EU parliament.
When new directives and regulations are in the pipe, the entire process is entirely transparent. They publish pretty much everything they do in no less than 23 languages. Consider that for a moment. 23 languages. If you've got anything to say about whatever the EC and the EP are working on, you merely need to read up and participate. And you can. And some do. At all levels. It's grass-root stuff, really. And grass-root movements actually get their way every now and then (e.g. ACTA), contrary to what occurs in the US congress.
The EU's key issue, if any, is this: When local parliaments transcribe a directive into local law that relates to improving air quality, they'll readily take credit for it. But when heads of States agree to pass a tough but much needed reform as an EU treaty, directive or regulation, they'll instantly blame the EU for it.
A case in point would be France's latest president, Hollande. He campaigned saying he'd renegotiate the stability pact. Anyone with an ounce of clue knew that he was full of shit. But even his key opponent, Sarkozy, didn't call him out on it, because the EU is far too convenient a scapegoat to lay bare. Hollande went on to lick Merkel's feet and promptly enact the actual treaty. And he'll need it, to pass further legislation down the road to axe the public sector. Want you to bet that he won't place part or all of the blame on the stability pact when he does?
Its other key issue would be the UK press' Euro-skepticism at large. Which, I assume, is your main source of information -- directly or not.
Realistically there's a lot of money behind closed source, not just the company producing it but the countless lawyers and political institutions that maintain and write patents. What about the big box stores that sell it and promote it, advertisers won't be left out in the cold either! Free and open source will continue to fight this uphill battle, not that it necessarily can't or shouldn't, but a company that could commercialize this and genuinely play nice with the community and markets would do quite well.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Every time you decide to redistribute GPL program that you bought or obtained from someone who paid for patent license you need to include per-unit costs in your price (and pay it to a patent owner). If the said per-unit cost was non-zero, you cannot redistribute the program for free, but actually GPL does not mandate you to redistribute software for free; it allows to include whatever costs you take for redistributing it (this time it means patent costs).
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is actually spelled out quite clearly even back in the GPLv2:
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Directly or indirectly basically means it is your responsibility to license the whole downstream for a potentially infinite number of copies. Since no patent owner is going to give you such a license - it's basically permission for everyone, anywhere to use their patent - you can't distribute the software at all. This in intentional so that patent owners can't use their patent to "sell" copies of GPL code.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, there's something wrong with software patents. I use both proprietary and FOSS software and appreciate the principles behind both methods of development and distribution. Existing copyright protection even supports the existence of both models
Say we need software to decode a popular video format. The proprietary developer writes said software and then distributes it in binary form for a fee. If people want to use this software they can do so by purchasing a license to use it and then can continue to use that software as they please. The license prevents them from distributing copies of that software to other people so that the developer doesn't miss out. The developer will likely keep the source code to themselves. End result: developer makes money on their hard work and can put food on the table, and the users get software that does what they want. Everyone is happy.
The FOSS developer writes their own software as well. It can't copy any functionality directly from the proprietary software above as the proprietary developer hasn't released the source code. The FOSS developer must write it from scratch, or perhaps reuse code from another FOSS project. Either way, a similar amount of effort goes into writing it as the proprietary developer has faced. This software is then released as source code with no restrictions on its end use. It may be released in compiled binary form too, or somebody else might choose to do this part. End result: users get software that they can use how they like and have the ability to study and modify it too if they wish (i.e. freedom). They can also distribute the software to others.
So everyone is happy; both models work nicely.
Then someone discovers that both of these software products infringe on a software patent. Now, the third party holding a patent can dictate or restrict both of the above situations despite not having contributed to the actual real work involved in either resulting product. In order to continue, the proprietary developer might negotiate a royalty fee that is deducted as a portion of the fee that users pay for the software.
Things get a little more complex for FOSS. Does the developer have to negotiate this, or those distributing binary copies of the software. Does that mean that every end user who compiles their own copy technically have to stump up a fee to some third party? Where do they pay? How can this be monitored to ensure that everyone who should pay, does? If the unit license cost is very low (e.g. a few cents), is it even feasible? No matter what, this process breaks the entire FOSS model.
So FOSS itself isn't broken, the system is. It should be able to legitimately cater for both proprietary and FOSS software models and it seems that we can better achieve this without software patents.
Not at all. It ensures the software stays free and not leashed to the creator. What happens if they sell the patent to a company with a vested interest in killing the software?
No, it doesn't. It establishes the GPL for what it is: a way to keep users of FOSS independent of 3rd party entities should they choose to be.
No, you still can. You can't yank people's chains by attacking people downstream over it. It's pretty obviously not Free Software if everyone who gets it has to come back to you for a patent license.
Well, there are two arguments:
1) FOSS not rewarding "creative 1%" proportionally.
2) Whether patent authors should be rewarded at all.
I think #1 is self-evident, as there are few GPL software authors (be them individuals or corporations) who accrued significant wealth by selling their GPL'd software.
Regarding #2: as I said in other posts, I cannot generalize here. I know personally two people who applied and were granted a patent, both work in rather successful, but not omni-potent companies (gamedev industry). The things patented were indeed non-obvious and I think they do deserve reward for making their work public. There are also obvious patent trolls, who patent bullshit and then sue; however, we may try to fight those separately without abandoning the whole concept at all.
Coding etudes
Many adherents claim it is all about freedom of information: The right to have the source code to modify. However for them it is really about just not having to pay for anything, though they won't admit it.
After all, FRAND open standards are something that would appear to be compatible with open information. They are available to all, and the standard contains everything you need to implement it, the fees for redistribution are fixed, and so on. While it does cost money, the information is open, the implementation is open. There are any secrets and you can re-implement it as you like.
However many OSS heads scream and cry about it, many of the same ones who will declare that OSS is not incompatible with making money. They'll claim it limits freedom but what they are really mad about is that it limits their ability to get things for free. They don't want to have to pay for software, and FRAND does stand in opposition to that.
People need to decide which kind of free software they care about: Do you care about open access to the source and information, or do you care about not paying? Either is fine but be clear what it is that matters. Don't claim that openness of code is important and then get mad when code is open, but there are fees for redistribution.
An example would be H.264. The standard is an open one, and FRAND licensed. You can get the reference code and it has been gotten and improved by projects like x264. However, if you wish to distribute your works, you need to pay for it. It is open, but not no-cost.
If no-cost is what you want, say so. Don't try to claim that you want open access to code, when what you really want is to just not have to pay for any software.