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Red Hat Pledges Patent Protection For 99 Percent of FOSS-ware (theregister.co.uk)
Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open-source software. From a report: The company has made more or less the same offer since 2002, when it first made a "Patent Promise" in order to "discourage patent aggression in free and open source software." Back then the company didn't own many patents and claimed its non-enforcement promise covered 35 per cent of open-source software. The Promise was revised in order to reflect the company's growing patent trove and to spruce up the language it uses to make it more relevant. The revised promise "applies to all software meeting the free software or open source definitions of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI)." [...] It's not a blank cheque. Hardware isn't covered and Red Hat is at pains to point out that "Our Promise is not an assurance that Red Hat's patents are enforceable or that practicing Red Hat's patented inventions does not infringe others' patents or other intellectual property." But the company says 99 percent of FOSS software should be covered by the Promise.
I like Redhat as a company, and their software. But I worry when Oracle buys them someday...
The patent process is rife with political gaming. This protection is essential in forcing corporations to respect the innovation in FOSS.
The AC3 decoder in FFmpeg is GPL, I guess this falls in the 1%, because I know Dolby would sue are ass if we tried to use it in a product without paying Dolby a royalty. (and actually Dolby won't certify products that use FFmpeg anyway.)
Trust me. I swear. Honest injun'.
Why only 99%? If the software is FOSS, then the protection should be 100%, no less.
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But I worry when Oracle buys them someday...
Exactly. Wouldn't it have made more sense to file the patents as prior art? As it is now, those patents are like nuclear weapons: never to be used, but always ready to fall into the wrong hands.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"FOSS-ware" would mean "(Free/Open Source Software)-ware"
The accepted terms are "free software," "free (as in speech) software," "software libre," and if you really insist, "F/OSS" or "FOSS" as expanded above. Also valid but with slightly different definitions: "GPL-compatible" (tighter definition), "open source" (looser definition, allows prohibiting modification or even sharing), and "copyleft" (looser still).
If I were to coin a new term for something meeting RMS's Free Software Definition, I'd consider "freedomware"
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
So Red Hat is okay using software patents against people who are not embracing open source?
"Information should be free unless I disagree with how you're using it" is not in any way a morally superior position to the more proprietary model of "I should be able to use information the way I want but other people shouldn't."
"We where able to remove 99% of the tumor"...
So, this understanding... if its not in a contract. Then its just a promise. I promise to not sue you for using my IP giving condition XYZ. Until one day I decide to sue you for using my IP given condition XYZ.
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
I like the Red Hat Chili Peppers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Translation: Red Hat wants to patent open source stuff, and hold it for safe keeping.
"Defensive patents" are a terrible idea that increases the risk of patent abuse in the future and perpetuates the broken nature of the patent system.
The AC3 decoder in FFmpeg is GPL, I guess this falls in the 1%, because I know Dolby would sue are ass
How so? I thought Dolby Digital was used in DVD since 1997 and in cinema since 1992, putting it over the 20-year limit on patents. Which subsisting patents cover the standardized form of Dolby Digital?
I see it as little different from the copyleft model used by the GNU project on which Fedora and RHEL are built: distribute your program as free software, and assert your copyright against those who refuse to pass on equivalent rights to the users.
The problem was that systemd was railroaded so fast through most of the major distros -- almost as if it were an insideous update to a proprietary OS, with the questionable acceptance by the Debian technical committee being the worst outcome, as it affected so many derivative distros.
This is untrue. Yes, many distros decided to adopt it in a short timeframe, but Red Hat had been testing systemd for years before that, and it's not like this was the first time that someone has either tried to replace sysvinit or someone has tried to introduce process tracking to the kernel. The pain points were known for decades, and as someone who has written a (short) book on the shell, anyone who prefers Bash as a scripting language has brain damage.
Debian's technical committee was split between systemd and upstart, with OpenRC being a distant third, and only one person who favored sysvinit. Since it is hopefully not in dispute that upstart was the worse option there, we can consider the decision to have been the best outcome. Note also that this was merely a decision about the default init system: sysvinit is still supported. The reason why sysvinit was not popular, however, was that the init scripts are comparatively more difficult to maintain, and generally slower. If Devuan has decided to shoulder the maintenance burden, I'm sure I wish them the best of luck with that.
The anti-systemd crowd here are morons, severally and collectively. No, systemd is not perfect, but there's a reason why people have been trying to replace sysvinit for the past three decades. Even OpenRC is almost entirely written in C. Either learn why, or quit complaining.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I hate the idea that a single corporation holds patents covering 99% of open source software. That's an extremely precarious position to be in. It means we not only have to trust the company to be well-behaved, but we have to trust that any future owners of the company or the patent hoard have to be well-behaved.
In other words, it adds quite a lot of uncertainty to working with open source software.
This is sentiment that I would broadly agree with. I don't dispute the usefulness of Bash as a command language, but scripting is not where it excels. Arrays are painful, conditionals are an external command, and functions are limited to positional parameters. Even parsing command-line options is ugly. Where Bash shines is the ten-lines-or-less script, the glue code that marshals other commands, or transforms output into another input. It also is extremely well suited to processing structured or semi-structured text; the things that one can do with parameter expansion and variable access are impressive. A friend recently confessed to me that they had done all of the research for their doctoral thesis in epigenetics using Bash, and once I recovered from the shock it made a great deal of sense: what else is genetic data but a bunch of text strings?
I do consider Bash and the shell to be essential knowledge for the programmer; that's why I wrote a book about it. However, outside of a few very narrow use cases, there are better options for scripting languages.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Is there any "open source" company that's less "open source" than Red Hat? As i understand it, none of their software is free.
If Linux applications are, eventually, made to only run on systemd; then those applications might not work with FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer.
Or that is how I understand it.