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Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Prepare for explanations as to why this is bad in 3, 2, 1...
It's clear what's going on here is that Google is once again trying to return to it's "Don't be Evil" roots -- even though its behavior is painting it less and less of the champion of the free internet, and more just-another-profit-centered-corporation. When you sue an open source software producer, you usually don't get much money or anything in return, so it's not a big deal monetarily. The gesture however gives them some PR points they've desperately been seeking lately, especially amongst the tech community they've alienated by cancelling Reader. Likely though, it's too little, too late.
A whole ten patents? How generous of them.
Question: was Google ever going to sue F/OSS developers?
" It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge."
That's not weird. That's exactly how it should be.
How about they put their time and money into bribing^lobbying our legislature to eleminate them, problem solved.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
"if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge."
And if i were to give code under a free fork that was from Microsoft divulged under NDA, it wouldn't be covered either.
If you use something you need a license for in ways not covered by the license and not in ways the license cannot control your use, then you are not allowed to use it that way.
Wny is this only a problem for some idiots when it's a GPL license, and absolutely unnoticed by them under any other license?
Oracle is using Map Reduce - wonder if they infringe?
Microsoft is using Map Reduce - wonder if they infringe?
Perhaps Apple is using it as well, somewhere.
They do not, however, pledge not to sell patents to a third party which has made no such promises.
Until the founders die, and the next board comes in, filled with total assholes, who WILL sue.
Don't do it. Not until the patents expire. Things change. Businesses are transitory groups of people. No guarantees can be honestly made by any corporation.
God forbid they actually open source any of their stuff. Like how about Google Reader, instead of tossing into the shredder?
It has always annoyed me how reluctant Google is to release source.
Question: was Google ever going to sue F/OSS developers?
I don't know. Is Apple still developing certain low-level parts of Mac OS X under the APSL, or has Darwin gone completely proprietary? What I do know is that Motorola Mobility, a Google company, has sued Apple.
From the summary:
The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party.
Or to translate from flamebait to English:
They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
Note that IBM did the same thing with about 1000 of its patents, more than 10 years ago. And shortly
thereafter, followed up with another 1000 or so.
Man up or shut up.
If you're going to post something, you might not like the moderation; live with it instead of being a whiny bitch.
I believe Postgres and many other BSD projects refused to use the OIN and other "FREE"-pledged patents.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This is something you will never see Microsoft do.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Love the understated way Google's rattling the patent saber here: "If you stay open-source you're probably safe, but if we think you're a commercial entity with closed source we may unleash the software patent lawyers."
So we won't get sued if we produce things that Google can use for their own commercial activities. AWESOME
If Google transfer ownership they lose control and any "pledges" they have made are worth zip.Unless they make it a contractual obligation for the new owner to honor the OPN... And since not even Google is really legally bound by the OPN it might be a bit much to demand that a new owner are.
Something simple like a $100M bond that can be drawn down by anyone who is sued by them for patent infringement.
My reading of the Defensive Termination clause is that it allows Google to terminate its patent licenses to any company that initiates patent litigation against Google over *any product or service*, not just a product or service that uses one of the Google-licensed patents. For example, if Samsung sued Motorola over a hardware patent, then that clause would allow Google to revoke Samsung's license (e.g., for some Silicon Valley subsidiary) to use any of its MapReduce patents.
Not saying this is evil or greedy, but it is more one-sided in Google's favor than I was expecting.
Or to translate from zealot to English:
They'll share with anyone else who will hurt there competition.
BTW. Not the same concept as the GPL at all since OPN about ideas, which lots of people can have at the same time without having shared or stolen, and GPL is about actual software.
The chance of several parties writing exactly the same piece of (non trivial) software, if they have no contact, is practically zero. The chance of several parties coming up with the same idea for a piece of software is pretty big. (subrutines comes to mind)
Promissory estoppel (you promised, so you have to stop) is enforceable at least in the US, AU, and UK. The consultations are a) a clear promise. ("We don't like to sue" is insufficient), b) reliance on the promise (we made this software knowing that Goog promised not to sue) and c) inequity (it would be unfair for Goog to sue when they promised not to).
In some countries, it can only be used as a defense, to have a lawsuit dismissed. You can't sue someone to make them live up to a unilateral promise. They say it's "a shield, not a sword". In AU, it can be used as a sword - you could sue Gopgle to force them to live up to the promise, or for damages if they don't. That means that an Aussie user could sue Google for damages if Google threatened to enforce the patent against some software on which they rely.
Aside from tbe legal terms, imagine you're on the jury. Google sues someone. The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
I suppose that depends on how smart I am and how well each side presented their case. :)
Me, personally, knowing what I know about this right now, I'd find against Google.
If Google owns any patents that are obvious, (and if they don't, other companies certainly do) then giving a free pass to open source doesn't do much to ameliorate the problem. Many people like to earn money. Even people who contribute to open source are often partly motivated by getting paid jobs as a result of their efforts. Given this, it is still a problem that smaller companies who sell closed source software or hardware based on closed source software, are still under threat from obvious patents.
The only sensible solution is to get rid of obvious patents. One way to do this is to eliminate software patents (i.e. the de facto software patents that exist today). Sure it would mean that some truly original work was no longer protected, but I think on balance it's the right way to go.
In comparison, how fair would it be if a law let some lucky restaurants close down all nearby competition, but then those few remaining restaurants showed their magnanimity by permitting people to give away free food to the homeless if the felt like it.
Or to translate from English to Marketing:
Google will contribute its patented technology immediately to benefit the public good, and pledges to support open-source community projects into the future. Google will confine all its competitive legal actions to the commercial arena, encouraging the growth of non-Google technologies, pushing the state of the art ever forward.
...I feel dirty now... I think I got some marketing slime on me... ...Turing help me, I want multi-level enterprise synergy to embiggen the opportunity for realized potential!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Yes, unless GOOGs very high priced, very well connected lawyers manage to convince a judge that the promise shouldn't be admissible in court.
You're off base because dogs have a better sense of smell than do. How is this relevant to your post, you may wonder. Your subject line is:
Irrelevant to the real issues of patents
Indeed, your idea of the "real issue" (patents that fail the obviousness test), is, as you say, completely irrelevant to this discussion. Therefore, it makes no more sense for you to post that on this page than for me to post about dogs.
BTW, given that you think "the real problem is obvious patents", is the solution not therefore obvious? Stop granting and enforcing obvious patents! That doesn't even require ANY change in the law, because obviousness is already law and has been since the beginning. Simply following the law would solve the problem of "obvious" patents.
I can't fathom how anyone could think, even for a second, that completely eliminating all patents on anything new is the logical solution, as opposed to simply getting the patent office to do their job. That worked fine for a couple hundred years.
Too bad they didn't pledge to keep all their little services running, google code, wave, catalogs, notebook... I wonder if it would have mattered.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
It's really a matter of reputation. Google's business model turned out to be largely relying on their being Open Source friendly. With this pledge they reinforce this image. If they betray this image, the backdraft could be painful. Probably not fatal, but painful.
I'm really as defiant as the next guy about Google's behaviour, and I don't take at face value their motto of not doing evil, but on the matters of IP they seem to have been consistently opposed to maximalism, and have supported many open stuff. I watch them closely on data privacy matters, but in most other issues I find their position decent - so far.
There's nothing like $HOME
their motto of not doing evil
-pedant- It's "Don't Be Evil" (aka Microsoft) -/pedant- We ALL do wrong occasionally, just because we're human and we screw up. For some companies, evil is what they ARE, nastiness is their core.
It was probably the way you brought the Bill of Rights into the discussion. Likely they wanted to argue with you but couldn't because it would undo all their moderation on the page.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Isn't that the same as saying that if you bought a patent you could void all current licensed copies in existence? Each of those licenses was a contract of sorts, right?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
It is relevant because Google is doing this for a reason, and there are really only two possible ones. First, it is a free gift to the Open Source community. That would be very nice but that's not how this decision would be interpreted by most people. Second, it is Google's attempt to ameliorate the impact of some of the unfair aspects of patents system, on open source developers. In that case, my claim that this measure is irrelevant to the real issues, because it doesn't address the root cause, is correct. Perhaps "insufficient" would have been a better term than "irrelevant". Now you might still object that it's not on topic to post that a measure that is proposed is not a sufficient solution to the greater problem that it aims to solve, but I think that that is a rather petty objection.
As to eliminating obvious patents, the question is how specifically to do this. The law does indeed disallow obvious patents. However, obvious is an ambiguous term, and wherever there is any room for interpretation, there is room for gross error as is happening now. So until you or anyone else can get a sensible plan to get the patent office to "do their job", my proposal to eliminate software patents still stands as a reasonable alternative.
Or let me put it this way: what software patents can you name that really did deserve to be granted and were not obvious, and how valuable have they been (relative to the previous existing technologies). Now compare that with the damage done by the threat of being sued over obvious patents.
Or to translate from flamebait to English:
They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
Correction:
They'll share with anyone else who shares, but as long as they're the only ones profiting from it.
It's better than some companies, but hardly the slam dunk or sea change it's made out to be.
Honestly, their lawyers probably already told them that it wasn't worth going after any open source projects because in a lot of cases there wasn't money in it.
Do no evil? Hahahahahaha....Hoohohohohoh...damn, my aching sides- you people are going to kill me.
Google is part of the power bloc that ensures continued support for Software Patents in the USA, Europe and Asia. Google pays billions directly into the pockets of key politicians. Google is, of course, but another face of the NSA- although the NSA itself is probably neutral on the issue (or maybe somewhat anti).
What limits companies like Google and Microsoft is publicity, namely how the corporations are perceived by the general body of technically aware Humans. Bashing the community openly is seen as counter-productive. Raising the ire of the community is seen as a very dangerous strategy. Of course, doing maximum evil in ways least likely to be exposed to the majority is fine.
Google is far more evil than Microsoft. Microsoft is your ordinary amoral American corporation with delusions of grandeur. Sure MS steals the work of others (and sometimes has to pay for this through court imposed fines). Sure, MS pays massive bribes to politicians and corporate managers to get their software exclusively used in companies and nations. Sure, MS funds legal action by crooks (like SCO) against the 'opposition'. But even so, at the end of the day, MS is just 'doing business'.
Google, on the other hand, is all about maximising the police state on behalf of the US government and other friendly nations. Google is designed to massively extend the spying abilities of the state, and massively extend the states ability to mine the data gathered by spying. None of this is about (fictional) terrorists or criminals. All of this is about giving your rulers perfect control over the sheeple. The sheeple respond to mass media propaganda, and the state controls that propaganda. Google completes the feedback loop in near real time, so that the control messages can be perfected for the results they desire.
Each year Rupert Murdoch (Blair's own Goebbels) sends out corporate Xmas cards. Each of them has an illustration showing media barons (not just Fox News) as 'foxes' and the listeners as 'sheep'. If you object to the word 'sheeple' you are one of the sheeple. To Google, everyone that uses their services, and by doing so gives up some detail about themselves, is 'sheeple'- and they have no guilt using and abusing such people, and their trust.
PS the owners of Slashdot willingly block citizens of Iran from accessing the open-source web-site resources they also operate- and no, this is NOT required by US law.
As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
That naturally depends on how much money Google is offering.
It's very much possible to profit from open source software.
Excellent post, raymorris. Though one thing I wanted to bring up is that I believe there might be rare circumstances where you can sue to enforce a unilateral promise. An example might be someone publically pledging to donate a large sum of money to a charity. Say, if a corporation pledged to donate five million dollars to a hospital to build a build a new maternity ward. If that hospital reasonably believed the pledge and started engaging contractors to build it but the corporatin then withdrew the promise. As best as I understand, that hospital could sue to compel the corporation to deliver on its pledge or at the very least pay damages to the hospital amounting to the money the hospital spent when it reasonably believed the corporation's pledge. I believe that can happen in the US or am I mistaken?
As an interesting side note, I'm pretty sure that you can use the courts to enforce a unilateral pledge in some continental european countries, Germany I believe is an example.
That lines up with what I learned in my (US) business law course a decade ago, which explicitly covered the topic. Not a lawyer, not legal advice, YMMV, etc.
The code that results from this must be open. It looks like you can profit from it the same way you can profit from other open source software -- either using it (if Brother made their printer drivers open source; or an engineering firm released open source CAD software), or selling support for it. Same conditions as the GPL.
And yea, they're almost certainly doing it because it's not worth fighting, and they're making that position public. That's nice. It probably cost them something to make this statement, vs not costing a dime to just ignore anyone who does this. Maybe this gives them some legal benefits regarding trademark dilution type stuff, I don't really know if anything like that applies to patents. And it gives them PR benefits. And it probably benefits them because they can then take that code and know it will have efficient algorithms that they can use -- as long as they're the only ones doing it, then they make open source code better and they can freely take that better code and use it however they want. But it's good for us too, because we can use that same open source code, and we can use their patents when writing that code.
Is it 100% altrustic? No. Neither is what Torvalds or Stallman does. There's no such thing. Is it going to be good for the open source community as a whole though? Probably. It's not perfect, but it's still a step forward for the open source community.
Ok, I know it's much MUCH more complicated to just completely change the license under which everything is covered, but couldn't they at least add "we won't sue open source" to their license text? Better yet, apply whatever the patent-equivalent of Creative Commons Non-Commercial license is to all products from here on out.
It may be technically binding as it stands, but it's still pretty wishy-washy. That said, good on em! That's the first good news I've heard from them in awhile.
The patent office is doing their job: Protecting the intellectual monopolies of corporations.
The logical solution is to completely eliminate patents. They fail to achieve their stated goal of promoting innovation. As with every government program, it achieves the opposite of it's intended goal.
I, for one, welcome our new google overlords if this in fact means other following the same example would be spared from patent claims (applies to the US mostly but still).
Aside from tbe legal terms, imagine you're on the jury. Google sues someone. The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
That's assuming the defendant got enough money for the lawsuit to even reach the point of having a jury deciding anything, and that is a BIG assumption, at least in the US.
Most defendant would be bankrupted long before that when faced with the financial might of someone like Google. See RIAA suits for numerous examples. See how long the SCO suits lasted even though they have nothing on their side, they lost only because the other side, IBM, have more money and lawyers than they do.
It's really a matter of reputation. Google's business model turned out to be largely relying on their being Open Source friendly. With this pledge they reinforce this image. If they betray this image, the backdraft could be painful. Probably not fatal, but painful.
I'm really as defiant as the next guy about Google's behaviour, and I don't take at face value their motto of not doing evil, but on the matters of IP they seem to have been consistently opposed to maximalism, and have supported many open stuff. I watch them closely on data privacy matters, but in most other issues I find their position decent - so far.
So, this practically means you can trust Google not to sue you.... until it became profitable for them to sue you. E.g. Google changes business model and no longer rely on being open source friendly.
Which would be the same case even if Google had made no promise at all. I.e. the promise is worthless.
The cowardly moderator speaks!
to all those saying this is meaningless, don't trust them, they could revoke this so don't rely on it. why not just request a license for $0 under these exact terms if you wish to use any of these patents in your project? then there will be no question of this being legally binding and u can use the contents of these patents freely.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
It did? I thought it turned out to be largely relying on advertising revenue.
What this has to do with either open source or patents is not at all clear.
Kid-proof tablet..
Hello everyone my name is Sean, I am the founder of bizlifter.com. I was inspired through ayn rands works to create a website which allows people to create, operate and grow a business for free. We are creating zero entrance barrier for anyone to create a business and many zero's in the expenses of existing companies. We offer, scheduling, billing, marketing, advertising, and the ability to get booked like a hotel, airline, or a train...... I would appreciate any feedback from the community. You can email me directly at ceo@bizlifter.com
Are you guys using some pro version of Google Translate? Coz Flaimbait and Zealot don't appear as supported languages in my browser...
Specifically, Google is saying they will share their patents with anyone else who shares their source code.
It's an unfair deal (unlike the GPL, where the contract is "I share code, you share code"). Until they actually open source their MapReduce (and other) code, this is pure PR spin.
Don't quote me on this.
Google is "open source friendly"? Since when? They take a hell of a lot more than they give.
Isn't that the same as saying that if you bought a patent you could void all current licensed copies in existence? Each of those licenses was a contract of sorts, right?
If you buy a patent, you can grant new licenses, but you can't do anything about prior grants. Google has just attempted to grant a license to everyone who uses a compatible source license. To me the question is, can you even do that without a legal document, e.g. the GPL?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why don't you show us a promise that isn't worthless. Realistically any promise, or word of honor, pledge, etc. that does not have a legal signed contract is technically worthless. Doesn't make your word any less weighty.
That's a good point! I'd say no. But honestly i have no idea what a patent license looks like. We've all seen copyrights though. Could you bake a patent license into a copyright notice that allows it to create new license copies? That sounds really odd.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Is it 100% altrustic?
if we get any action that is >0% altruistic from a corporation or isn't directly harming us, we are doing good.