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Google Announces Android Cross-Licensing Program 'PAX' -- But Why? (consortiuminfo.org)
"Linux and open-source software have had to contend with intellectual property legal challenges for years," writes ZDNet. "Now, Google has started a new effort to bring peace to potential Android IP sore points: PAX... a royalty-free, community-patent cross-license."
PAX is starting with nine members: Google, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, HTC, Foxconn Technology Group, Coolpad, BQ, HMD Global, and Allview. These companies own more than 230,000 global patents. PAX's purpose is to create a "community-driven [patent] clearinghouse, developed together with our Android partners, [that] ensures that innovation and consumer choice -- not patent threats -- will continue to be key drivers of our Android ecosystem. PAX is free to join and open to anyone."
Slashdot reader Andy Updegroved writes: The question is why? The announcement and the related website are extremely brief, and although everyone is invited to get a copy of the cross license, Google reserves the right to decide first whether your motives are pure and you can keep a secret. And so far, the only members of the "PAX Community" listed are existing Google business partners. Is Google aware of some new patent tempest brewing just over the horizon, about to burst into public view? And will any other company names and logos be added to the PAX Community Web page? We'll just have to stay tuned to find out.
Andy Updegrove tells ZDNet it does involve "formal cross-licenses between participants, and therefore enforceable rights, but not an infrastructure to do more (at least insofar as one can tell from the initial announcement)."
Slashdot reader Andy Updegroved writes: The question is why? The announcement and the related website are extremely brief, and although everyone is invited to get a copy of the cross license, Google reserves the right to decide first whether your motives are pure and you can keep a secret. And so far, the only members of the "PAX Community" listed are existing Google business partners. Is Google aware of some new patent tempest brewing just over the horizon, about to burst into public view? And will any other company names and logos be added to the PAX Community Web page? We'll just have to stay tuned to find out.
Andy Updegrove tells ZDNet it does involve "formal cross-licenses between participants, and therefore enforceable rights, but not an infrastructure to do more (at least insofar as one can tell from the initial announcement)."
If GPLv3 included a patent license for anything your company contributes, that would work okay for many companies. I could recommend contributing to GPLv3 projects if that were the case.
However, as was pointed out when the the language of GPLv3 was being drafted, the actual text of the license is far broader than that, and arguably allows anyone to "steal" *any* patents owned by a company that contributes to a large project, including patents that have nothing to do with whatever the company contributed. Stallman is aware of this issue and decided not to address it. Therefore I and many others have to recommend that large companies especially be careful to *not* distribute any GPLv3 with contributions, via Github or any other method. The problem is that by simply doing a *pull* on Github, you're giving up patent rights to anything in the code you pulled, code which you've never seen, including patents from a different division of your company, which you aren't personally aware of.
Suppose
M$ is making tons of cash from Android device manufacturers, with the help of a secret set of patents.
May be Google is trying to bring together a set as big as M$ one ?
Yes, I believe that's it. Google is going after Microsoft's patent tax.
By design, many Android developers can now port their Android applications to Windows phone without changing a line of code. The only thing that's missing is Google Play Services (if an app depends on those particular APIs), and even then, Microsoft is funding a replacement of Google Play Services, and in the meantime, power Windows phone users (the few that exist) are simply rooting their Windows devices and installing Google Play Services themselves.
So with Microsoft depending more and more on Android itself and becoming more vulnerable as a result, it would make sense that Google would try to leverage the patents of the Android community at large to stop Microsoft from continuing to impose its patent tax on existing Android manufacturers.
And this is also where the "Google reserves the right to decide first whether your motives are pure" test comes in. If Google were to accept patent partners willy nilly just like some open source licenses automatically do it, then Microsoft would just need to spin off a separate part of itself to hold all its patents (or sell all its patents to a patent troll) before another part of itself partnered with Google.