I'll take a closer look at those patents over the weekend and some of them may indeed go back to pre-smartphone PC days but still be valid. Software patents can be valid for 20 years according to an international treaty (TRIPs).
I think I read something about Motorola not intending to support Windows Phone 7 anyway. In that case, they have nothing to lose in terms of a customer.
Keeping in mind software patents are meaningless in Europe.
They exist in Europe (some examples here) and they are upheld by national high courts such as the German Bundesgerichtshof.
There's too much going on there with several major patents asserting patents. They can't all be wrong at the same time, and we're talking about a notorious patent minefield. I don't say quick surrender -- but a solution must be found.
In terms of the patents concerned, I'll take a closer look at them. I've updated my blog posting with a link to an article that shows the complaints filed with the district court and the US International Trade Commission.
Microsoft will be around for a long time to come, and so will Google, despite all of this. So I wouldn't worry (or gloat) about them. The real concern is how all of this patent litigation will ultimately impact Android application developers. That's what I stressed in my first reaction to this. App developers invest a lot of creativity, time, money and hard work in a platform. If Google doesn't step up now and make a really serious effort to work out deals with all those patent holders, Android as a platform may be in trouble and app developers would suffer.
Google knew all along that smartphones (and mobile phones in general) are a field in which plenty of patents exist, and in which they are enforced aggressively. Google doesn't have a patent portfolio to match the portfolios of Microsoft, Apple or Oracle; so it doesn't represent a counterthreat. But it could try to negotiate license deals. That's what it must do now, not only for itself, not only for Android phone vendors, but above all for the application developer community its platform depends on.
Right, it's not the official name at this stage. According to Wikipedia, "The Conservative and Unionist Party,[5] more commonly known as the Conservative Party, [...] was founded in 1834 out of the old Tory Party, which itself had been founded in 1678, and even today it is still often colloquially referred to as the Tory Party, with its members, the Conservatives, also being referred to as Tories. It changed its name to "Conservative and Unionist Party" in 1912, after merging with the Liberal Unionist Party."
You ask all the right questions but let me explain what they said their plan was (I've been describing all the time, not justifying).
They thought that the "Pirate" name was key to draw attention to the issue and they tried to ride on that PR wave. By now, however, I'm convinced that the "Pirate" name -- more befitting of a costume party than of a political party -- was a mistake and with a "dull" name they might not have had that initial PR momentum but they could have built a real organization that's here to stay.
In terms of single-issue party or not, they figured they could do it like the Greens, who started out as an environmentalist and pacifist movement that over time took positions on all of the issues. I believe the Greens actually did have more of a an all-issue kind of party program in the beginning even though they were indeed very focused on protecting the environment, fighting against nuclear reactors, and opposing all weapons and wars (although in the end the German Greens, when they were in the government, supported the bombing of Serbia and the war in Afghanistan...).
To comment particularly on item #4, the Pirate Party might have done gradually better if there had been some procedural moves in a major lawsuit involving "piracy". That apparently was the case before the EU elections but not this time, where some court proceeding will start next week or so. But then the question is whether it's really a serious political game plan to be so much "event-driven" that you get 0.7% without an event and 7.1% with one occurring at the right time. That's actually another characteristic of activist groups (who get more attention and support around such events) that doesn't fit the definition of a political party.
It's telling that you doubt they ever had the "desire" to become a serious political force. That shows what impression they created. But their founder, Rick Falkvinge, said repeatedly in recent years that Swedish elections usually have a close outcome between the left wing and the right wing and his game plan was to make it into parliament so that the Pirate Party would then be able to tip the scales in favor of either left or right, subject to concessions on intellectual property policy by whomever they would ultimately support. Being the decisive small part that determines who governs a country was a pretty serious plan, I would say.
Since a number of activists from the anti-software-patent movement joined the Pirate Party, including its first MEP (Christian Engström), I've been following its development closely and at some point even lent them a signature to support their participation in an election in my country (Germany), even though I ultimately didn't vote for them.
I've commented on the Pirate Party's failure to evolve into a serious political force. The EUobserver, an independent website covering European politics, published a streamlined version of my analysis. The original version goes into some more detail and appeared on my blog.
It was a short reference to the fact that it demonstrates the uselessness of those pledges. So it was on-topic. But responding in detail to more comments or questions on TurboHercules would have been off-topic, thus my link to LWN.
Another point to remember, all MS would have to do to get around their promise is to sell a.NET patent or two to another company. They would of course get protection from being sued but everyone else . . . soooo sorrrrrry.
Show me even one other patent pledge or promise, including Red Hat's patent policy, where that wouldn't be just the same thing. This isn't Microsoft-specific at all.
The "workaround" you just described would presumably even work for the GPLv3.
I only mentioned it in connection with a patent promise that proved useless, and I gave other examples of patent pledges that don't help.
and not many here bought you line.
Wrong. Some of my postings in that discussion back then got voted up to 4 and 5 before people mobilized the usual 'Groklie' crowd, which then misused its moderator points here (and there was a call over on Groklie to do just that). That kind of mobilization isn't representative of reasonable, unbiased people. Actually it's quite possible that many of the Groklie folks who came over here to misuse mod points were just misguided.
I didn't want to get into a detailed IBM vs. TurboHercules discussion here, so I referred another Groklie fanboy to the most recent LWN discussion on the topic.
Nice to see you refuted so thoroughly at the link you so kindly provided - thanks!
That was a long discussion and all the TurboHercules stuff came up, so I think anyone who wants to look for answers to the usual 'Groklies' can find them there.
Microsoft's strategic interests are Windows and Office. Those two cash cows [...]
That reaffirms rather than contradicts what I said: interest in developer support. At least for Windows that's definitely key. So I can see their strategic interest in Mono.
I wish you would stop out spouting that nonsense about TurboHercules. IBM never attacked the open source project Hercules. Let's get that clear from the outset. They *do* have licensing requirements for Z/OS [...] This is no different than Apple's position with MacOS X on their hardware and the licensing position they take.
Anyone interested in the facts can go to this detailed discussion on LWN and search for occurrences of TurboHercules on that page, debunking all of what you just said and a lot more.
I've been following software patent issues closely for a long time and I still haven't seen any patent promise that was 100% to my liking. So what the FSF says could also be said about Red Hat's patent promise and many other patent promises and "pledges". The TurboHercules exampled showed how little IBM cares about its patent pledge when it wants to defend its mainframe monopoly. But the worst of all patent licenses is the OIN's patent agreement.
I don't mean to say anyone should trust Microsoft's patent promise blindly, but one should look at the promise in connection with obvious business interests. I can't see how Microsoft would do anything that would run counter to its strategic interest, as a platform company, to maximize developer support.
Detailed analysis of Googkle's Bilski brief
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Once again, thanks for your reaction and for having identified yourself. I have meanwhile published a detailed analysis of Google's Bilski brief on my blog. It's certainly not "anti-software-patent". It stops far short of arguing that software shouldn't be patentable. It just says some software patents are too abstract, some are too "conventional", but of course, Google's own patents would not be affected by what they proposed. Not at all.
Google's Bilski brief is not anti-software-patent
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can assure you that I want to find out the truth about this, and I believe it's very honorable of you to have made a disclosure.
I have read Google's Bilski brief, and it only argues against business method patents and "abstract patents" on software, not against software patents in general. It also argues against patent inflation in this area, but that still isn't the same as opposing software patents.
I saw more than one passage recognizing the idea that future innovation should always be patentable.
The problem is that even if common sense may make some such wordings look like demands to abolish software patents, substantive patent law has its own logic and terminology. Here in Europe, we have a law that excludes computer programs "as such" from the scope of patentable subject matter. Still a Microsoft FAT patent and a Siemens XML document generator patent were upheld. New Zealand, too, now has to deal with the problem of how to tell software patents from "technical inventions" int his area.
What Google sent to the SCOTUS was against the Bilski business method patents, and went a little beyond, but was very far from demanding the abolition of patents that read on software. The European Patent Office, which grants tons of software patents all the time, could subscribe to every single one of Google's demands and still justify every single software patent grant it makes.
Again, forget common sense in connection with substantive patent law. Lots of wording will look on the surface as if they do away with softwaer patents -- without actually doing so if they had to be applied by a court.
As the dominant search engine, Google has an obligation to treat everyone on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis. Anything else would be an antitrust violation. That's why it won't happen. (If it theoretically did, it would just lead to the next lawsuit, plus potentially hefty fines levied by regulators around the globe, particularly the US Dept. of Justice and the European Commission.)
I assume we all want the rule of law, not the law of the strong.
Complaints against Google for unfair and discriminatory rankings of certain competitors on SERPs (search engine results pages) have already been lodged in several countries. I don't mean to comment on whether those complaints are credible or not, but one way or the other Google can't take any chances in that area.
There are reasons for which I increasingly believe this case isn't all about "evil Oracle vs. the good guys at Google". I oppose software patents and particularly the use of patents against free and open source software. In Google's case, we are however talking about a company that is very much pro-patent as far its own patents (especially the search engine patents) are concerned and just despises everyone else's when used against it. Now Google effectively calls on the community, but Google doesn't support the community in the fight against software patents. It's a typical case of wanting to have its cake and eat it.
There are also other reasons for concern, but this was just one important example and it has to do with the search engine.
The way I read the European Commission's decision, Oracle submitted Eben's paper as a supporting document along with its reply to the Commission's Statement of Objections. Attaching a supporting document is not the same as making a claim in one's own name. For an example, companies routinely attach market research from the likes of IDC and Gartner to their submissions, and that doesn't mean that they necessarily claim all of what's stated in those reports. (Of course, the way it was used calls into question Eben Moglen's independence by any reasonable standard, but not necessarily formally.)
Also, those merger control processes are pretty confidential. Oracle's response to the Statement of Objections was never published in its entirety. All that's publicly known is what the Commission's published decision states.
If the recording of the hearing were public, it would actually be a real problem for Oracle because of what they (several of them, not just Eben Moglen in his formally independent capacity) said about how to interpret the GPL in general, but I'm not allowed to disclose what exactly they said because the hearing took place behind closed doors and on a confidential basis.
Google's market capitalization as of now is around 150 billion dollars, Oracle's around 115 billion dollars. So it wouldn't be easy for Google to just gobble up Oracle. Theoretically, if Google bought Oracle, it could solve the IP problem. But these two companies are more or less on an equal footing in financial terms (although the $35 billion difference in market cap is nothing to sneeze at in absolute terms;-)).
It's an interesting thought, I admit, that someone would be able to hold Oracle's claims in the Sun merger control context against them now. But even if Google had forked on a GPLv2 basis and tried this now, the problem is that Eben Moglen made those statements in his effort to support Oracle. He denied that Oracle paid him for that particular effort but admitted that his Software Freedom Law Center (which is consipicuously silent on Oracle vs. Google) received "no more than 5%" of its funding from Oracle. So formally, Oracle can say that Eben Moglen acted independently. From a common sense point of view, everyone familiar with the EU process obviously knew that Eben Moglen was in Oracle's camp. But it couldn't be used legally against Oracle.
What you refer to is only a scenario where you take X amount of existing code and add Y amount of new code, without changing the existing code. The problem is that once you modify any part of the code on which the old patents read, it becomes "another use or implementation" of the patent claim. I believe Google would have had to make changes to many parts of the inner workings of the existing Java (OpenJDK, phoneME) code in its effort to optimize performance and take account of the specific characteristics of mobile devices.
A very strict interpretation of the GPL would indeed be incompatible with today's legal framework. There's no such thing as a piece of software that's guaranteed to be patent-unencumbered. So there will also be some exposure to the risk as long as there are software patents (if it were up to me, there wouldn't be any). The whole notion of "free software" is a wonderful vision but as long as there are software patents, it can't materialize to the full extent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take a closer look at those patents over the weekend and some of them may indeed go back to pre-smartphone PC days but still be valid. Software patents can be valid for 20 years according to an international treaty (TRIPs).
no windows mobile on Motorola
I think I read something about Motorola not intending to support Windows Phone 7 anyway. In that case, they have nothing to lose in terms of a customer.
Keeping in mind software patents are meaningless in Europe.
They exist in Europe (some examples here) and they are upheld by national high courts such as the German Bundesgerichtshof.
There's too much going on there with several major patents asserting patents. They can't all be wrong at the same time, and we're talking about a notorious patent minefield. I don't say quick surrender -- but a solution must be found.
In terms of the patents concerned, I'll take a closer look at them. I've updated my blog posting with a link to an article that shows the complaints filed with the district court and the US International Trade Commission.
Microsoft will be around for a long time to come, and so will Google, despite all of this. So I wouldn't worry (or gloat) about them. The real concern is how all of this patent litigation will ultimately impact Android application developers. That's what I stressed in my first reaction to this. App developers invest a lot of creativity, time, money and hard work in a platform. If Google doesn't step up now and make a really serious effort to work out deals with all those patent holders, Android as a platform may be in trouble and app developers would suffer.
Google knew all along that smartphones (and mobile phones in general) are a field in which plenty of patents exist, and in which they are enforced aggressively. Google doesn't have a patent portfolio to match the portfolios of Microsoft, Apple or Oracle; so it doesn't represent a counterthreat. But it could try to negotiate license deals. That's what it must do now, not only for itself, not only for Android phone vendors, but above all for the application developer community its platform depends on.
Right, it's not the official name at this stage. According to Wikipedia, "The Conservative and Unionist Party,[5] more commonly known as the Conservative Party, [...] was founded in 1834 out of the old Tory Party, which itself had been founded in 1678, and even today it is still often colloquially referred to as the Tory Party, with its members, the Conservatives, also being referred to as Tories. It changed its name to "Conservative and Unionist Party" in 1912, after merging with the Liberal Unionist Party."
Silly names don't come across as silly if they have a very long (and successful) tradition.
I didn't modify the photo. I didn't even provide or select it. That was done by the EUobserver staff and I guess they found it in some archive.
The question is to what extent a party is event-driven. In case of the Greens we don't talk about a discrepancy of 1 to 10.
You ask all the right questions but let me explain what they said their plan was (I've been describing all the time, not justifying).
They thought that the "Pirate" name was key to draw attention to the issue and they tried to ride on that PR wave. By now, however, I'm convinced that the "Pirate" name -- more befitting of a costume party than of a political party -- was a mistake and with a "dull" name they might not have had that initial PR momentum but they could have built a real organization that's here to stay.
In terms of single-issue party or not, they figured they could do it like the Greens, who started out as an environmentalist and pacifist movement that over time took positions on all of the issues. I believe the Greens actually did have more of a an all-issue kind of party program in the beginning even though they were indeed very focused on protecting the environment, fighting against nuclear reactors, and opposing all weapons and wars (although in the end the German Greens, when they were in the government, supported the bombing of Serbia and the war in Afghanistan...).
To comment particularly on item #4, the Pirate Party might have done gradually better if there had been some procedural moves in a major lawsuit involving "piracy". That apparently was the case before the EU elections but not this time, where some court proceeding will start next week or so. But then the question is whether it's really a serious political game plan to be so much "event-driven" that you get 0.7% without an event and 7.1% with one occurring at the right time. That's actually another characteristic of activist groups (who get more attention and support around such events) that doesn't fit the definition of a political party.
It's telling that you doubt they ever had the "desire" to become a serious political force. That shows what impression they created. But their founder, Rick Falkvinge, said repeatedly in recent years that Swedish elections usually have a close outcome between the left wing and the right wing and his game plan was to make it into parliament so that the Pirate Party would then be able to tip the scales in favor of either left or right, subject to concessions on intellectual property policy by whomever they would ultimately support. Being the decisive small part that determines who governs a country was a pretty serious plan, I would say.
Since a number of activists from the anti-software-patent movement joined the Pirate Party, including its first MEP (Christian Engström), I've been following its development closely and at some point even lent them a signature to support their participation in an election in my country (Germany), even though I ultimately didn't vote for them.
I've commented on the Pirate Party's failure to evolve into a serious political force. The EUobserver, an independent website covering European politics, published a streamlined version of my analysis. The original version goes into some more detail and appeared on my blog.
Really? then stop bringing it up . . .
It was a short reference to the fact that it demonstrates the uselessness of those pledges. So it was on-topic. But responding in detail to more comments or questions on TurboHercules would have been off-topic, thus my link to LWN.
Another point to remember, all MS would have to do to get around their promise is to sell a .NET patent or two to another company. They would of course get protection from being sued but everyone else . . . soooo sorrrrrry.
Show me even one other patent pledge or promise, including Red Hat's patent policy, where that wouldn't be just the same thing. This isn't Microsoft-specific at all.
The "workaround" you just described would presumably even work for the GPLv3.
We have been over your TurboHercules/IBM BS
I only mentioned it in connection with a patent promise that proved useless, and I gave other examples of patent pledges that don't help.
and not many here bought you line.
Wrong. Some of my postings in that discussion back then got voted up to 4 and 5 before people mobilized the usual 'Groklie' crowd, which then misused its moderator points here (and there was a call over on Groklie to do just that). That kind of mobilization isn't representative of reasonable, unbiased people. Actually it's quite possible that many of the Groklie folks who came over here to misuse mod points were just misguided.
I didn't want to get into a detailed IBM vs. TurboHercules discussion here, so I referred another Groklie fanboy to the most recent LWN discussion on the topic.
Nice to see you refuted so thoroughly at the link you so kindly provided - thanks!
That was a long discussion and all the TurboHercules stuff came up, so I think anyone who wants to look for answers to the usual 'Groklies' can find them there.
Microsoft's strategic interests are Windows and Office. Those two cash cows [...]
That reaffirms rather than contradicts what I said: interest in developer support. At least for Windows that's definitely key. So I can see their strategic interest in Mono.
I wish you would stop out spouting that nonsense about TurboHercules. IBM never attacked the open source project Hercules. Let's get that clear from the outset. They *do* have licensing requirements for Z/OS [...] This is no different than Apple's position with MacOS X on their hardware and the licensing position they take.
Anyone interested in the facts can go to this detailed discussion on LWN and search for occurrences of TurboHercules on that page, debunking all of what you just said and a lot more.
I've been following software patent issues closely for a long time and I still haven't seen any patent promise that was 100% to my liking. So what the FSF says could also be said about Red Hat's patent promise and many other patent promises and "pledges". The TurboHercules exampled showed how little IBM cares about its patent pledge when it wants to defend its mainframe monopoly. But the worst of all patent licenses is the OIN's patent agreement.
I don't mean to say anyone should trust Microsoft's patent promise blindly, but one should look at the promise in connection with obvious business interests. I can't see how Microsoft would do anything that would run counter to its strategic interest, as a platform company, to maximize developer support.
Once again, thanks for your reaction and for having identified yourself. I have meanwhile published a detailed analysis of Google's Bilski brief on my blog. It's certainly not "anti-software-patent". It stops far short of arguing that software shouldn't be patentable. It just says some software patents are too abstract, some are too "conventional", but of course, Google's own patents would not be affected by what they proposed. Not at all.
I can assure you that I want to find out the truth about this, and I believe it's very honorable of you to have made a disclosure.
I have read Google's Bilski brief, and it only argues against business method patents and "abstract patents" on software, not against software patents in general. It also argues against patent inflation in this area, but that still isn't the same as opposing software patents.
I saw more than one passage recognizing the idea that future innovation should always be patentable.
The problem is that even if common sense may make some such wordings look like demands to abolish software patents, substantive patent law has its own logic and terminology. Here in Europe, we have a law that excludes computer programs "as such" from the scope of patentable subject matter. Still a Microsoft FAT patent and a Siemens XML document generator patent were upheld. New Zealand, too, now has to deal with the problem of how to tell software patents from "technical inventions" int his area.
What Google sent to the SCOTUS was against the Bilski business method patents, and went a little beyond, but was very far from demanding the abolition of patents that read on software. The European Patent Office, which grants tons of software patents all the time, could subscribe to every single one of Google's demands and still justify every single software patent grant it makes.
Again, forget common sense in connection with substantive patent law. Lots of wording will look on the surface as if they do away with softwaer patents -- without actually doing so if they had to be applied by a court.
As the dominant search engine, Google has an obligation to treat everyone on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis. Anything else would be an antitrust violation. That's why it won't happen. (If it theoretically did, it would just lead to the next lawsuit, plus potentially hefty fines levied by regulators around the globe, particularly the US Dept. of Justice and the European Commission.)
I assume we all want the rule of law, not the law of the strong.
Complaints against Google for unfair and discriminatory rankings of certain competitors on SERPs (search engine results pages) have already been lodged in several countries. I don't mean to comment on whether those complaints are credible or not, but one way or the other Google can't take any chances in that area.
There are reasons for which I increasingly believe this case isn't all about "evil Oracle vs. the good guys at Google". I oppose software patents and particularly the use of patents against free and open source software. In Google's case, we are however talking about a company that is very much pro-patent as far its own patents (especially the search engine patents) are concerned and just despises everyone else's when used against it. Now Google effectively calls on the community, but Google doesn't support the community in the fight against software patents. It's a typical case of wanting to have its cake and eat it.
There are also other reasons for concern, but this was just one important example and it has to do with the search engine.
The way I read the European Commission's decision, Oracle submitted Eben's paper as a supporting document along with its reply to the Commission's Statement of Objections. Attaching a supporting document is not the same as making a claim in one's own name. For an example, companies routinely attach market research from the likes of IDC and Gartner to their submissions, and that doesn't mean that they necessarily claim all of what's stated in those reports. (Of course, the way it was used calls into question Eben Moglen's independence by any reasonable standard, but not necessarily formally.)
Also, those merger control processes are pretty confidential. Oracle's response to the Statement of Objections was never published in its entirety. All that's publicly known is what the Commission's published decision states.
If the recording of the hearing were public, it would actually be a real problem for Oracle because of what they (several of them, not just Eben Moglen in his formally independent capacity) said about how to interpret the GPL in general, but I'm not allowed to disclose what exactly they said because the hearing took place behind closed doors and on a confidential basis.
Google's market capitalization as of now is around 150 billion dollars, Oracle's around 115 billion dollars. So it wouldn't be easy for Google to just gobble up Oracle. Theoretically, if Google bought Oracle, it could solve the IP problem. But these two companies are more or less on an equal footing in financial terms (although the $35 billion difference in market cap is nothing to sneeze at in absolute terms ;-)).
It's an interesting thought, I admit, that someone would be able to hold Oracle's claims in the Sun merger control context against them now. But even if Google had forked on a GPLv2 basis and tried this now, the problem is that Eben Moglen made those statements in his effort to support Oracle. He denied that Oracle paid him for that particular effort but admitted that his Software Freedom Law Center (which is consipicuously silent on Oracle vs. Google) received "no more than 5%" of its funding from Oracle. So formally, Oracle can say that Eben Moglen acted independently. From a common sense point of view, everyone familiar with the EU process obviously knew that Eben Moglen was in Oracle's camp. But it couldn't be used legally against Oracle.
What you refer to is only a scenario where you take X amount of existing code and add Y amount of new code, without changing the existing code. The problem is that once you modify any part of the code on which the old patents read, it becomes "another use or implementation" of the patent claim. I believe Google would have had to make changes to many parts of the inner workings of the existing Java (OpenJDK, phoneME) code in its effort to optimize performance and take account of the specific characteristics of mobile devices.
A very strict interpretation of the GPL would indeed be incompatible with today's legal framework. There's no such thing as a piece of software that's guaranteed to be patent-unencumbered. So there will also be some exposure to the risk as long as there are software patents (if it were up to me, there wouldn't be any). The whole notion of "free software" is a wonderful vision but as long as there are software patents, it can't materialize to the full extent.