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.

Comments

Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing

[Apathist]

According to this, yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel

Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing

[beelsebob]

It's actually very clever. It means less open source software is GPLed, because the GPLv3 means that patent rights have to be dismissed. Thus more will be BSDed/MITed. Then, because it's BSDed/MITed, more big companies will actually use the software (because most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague). Then those big companies will release a closed version, and have to pay google.

Cunning indeed.

Re:it is in enforceable in at least US, UK, Austra

[Schmorgluck]

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.