On Software Patent Lawsuits Against OSS 400
Bruce Perens writes "We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: patent holders are filing suit against OSS developers." From the article: "We should not be confident that we will continue to have the right to use and develop Open Source software. A coordinated patent attack by a few companies, or even one large company, could completely destroy Open Source in the United States and cripple it in other nations. Funds and patent portfolios that have been established to help defend Open Source would not be sufficient to defend it. Only legislative changes to the patent system can fully protect Open Source and maintain it as a viable source of innovation for our future."
Protect Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
How many such cases have happened in the last 5-10 years?
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it's great when little guys like the University of California are able to stand up against big companies that steal their totally non-obvious concepts that nobody else had previously implemented.
Software patents aren't patents (Score:3, Insightful)
In the 19th century, there was heavy competition for the implementation of the telephone system. Edison wanted to enter the market. But Bell had already patented the system! What Edison did, then, was to invent a new way by which sounds can be inputted and outputted, and using his own, new system, managed to challenge Bell. Hence, patents in this case directly drove innovation.
But what if Bell had recieved a software patent? Then the patent would not cover, as in this c
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Bruce
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
This never happens.
You know the story: inventor invents "brilliant" new software (for example, let's say using a "hand held device" to "scroll through" a "list of currently running programs"), and wants to market it. Another company decides, "great idea," nicks it from him, and he threatens to sue. "Ah," the big companies say, "we have 5 patents that you cannot develop your software without!" Mr. Small Inventor is screwed.
Re:Protect Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Can ideas be stolen? Seriously, I can't tell you the number of times I've come up with a unique idea "that could never be copied" only to find out a few years later that someone else has discovered and implemented exactly the same idea, down to the details.
Each of us builds on the knowledge of those that come before us and sometimes the time is just right for an idea to be discovered. Quantum mechanics, the air plane,
Turn it around... (Score:3, Interesting)
or,
How can anyone continue to attract the investment they use to hire and pay software developers in a not-yet-making-money startup if, after investing all of that money, someone else can just skip the investment part and go right into making money off the finished work? If you have no chance of some much larger (or just slipperier) operator sim
Re:Turn it around... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bruce
Re:Turn it around... (Score:4, Insightful)
Software patents are really only useful to act as a roadblock to other companies, and in particular for patent trolls - they don't stop a truly motivated competitor from replicating your software product in a cleanroom environment, as long as they can code around the patents, which should virtually always be possible.
"Making money off the finished work" in this scenario would imply taking the copyrighted software and illegally selling it - copyright protection is more than enough to stop this. Patent protection is simply unnecessary for a thriving software business, as long as it is reasonably diligent in its use of copyright and trade secret protection.
Re:Turn it around... (Score:3)
Indeed. So how about we propose attacking the major problem: When we're writing code that to us is original, how can we check it against the body of patents to see if there's a match? I'm not talking a
Patent Reform (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Patent Reform (Score:5, Informative)
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
Re:Patent Reform (Score:5, Informative)
You may be right.
Chicken [wikipedia.org] (gallus gallus domesticus).
Re:Peer to patent project (Score:3)
Bruce
Not in Europe! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just saying.
Re:Not in Europe! (Score:2)
But if you thin sf.net is slow, wait until you meet berlios.
Interesting insights on legal landscape in Europe (Score:5, Informative)
Anonymous development model (Score:5, Interesting)
If the big fears come to pass on this, perhaps an anonymous development model could be made using currently-developing P2P encryption models. Regardless of if software patents are a political problem that may or not be fixed in the long run - the idea that a good person CAN ethically have need to become anonymous in their development of software may change the debate. Right now, the public concept of anonymous development is left to virus developers and other black-hat-types - it would be interesting if your child's educational software, or in this case model railroad software had to be developed behind the veil of secrecy.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Anonymous development model (Score:2)
Re:Anonymous development model (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think that virus writers get caught? Usually it's their own hubris and desire for credit that outs them in the end.
And OSS writers SHOULD get credit, with big, fat, annoyingly large banners for their contributions. Patents forcing them underground would be a sha
Re:Ah, it's all clear to me now (Score:4, Interesting)
If you'd like to learn more about this, read The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source [perens.com]
And regarding the gratification from writing a "duplicate", it doesn't work that way. Consider Firefox, or Apache: not duplicates of anything, although there are other products in the category. Or Linux: it works the way the POSIX standard says it should, so it shares a common interface with Unix. But everything else about it is different.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:definition of "duplicate" (Score:3, Insightful)
Bruce
Re:Anonymous development model (Score:3, Informative)
Patent violation isn't a creation issue, its a use issue as well.
The best solution is for individual developers to get a patent on something stupid and use it as a form of nuclear detente. If they can't do it, grant the copyright to an organization like EFF that can handle patent cross licensing. Until the whole concept is thrown out, writing software and not being armed with something you can threaten back with is like walking into a minefield.
And th
Re:Anonymous development model (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see two problems with this idea:
1) If a piece of software is developed anonymously then how can you be sure that someone didn't come along and copy code into it from a piece of proprietary software? Some nefarious individual could (anonymously and secretly) copy their code into a piece of open source software with the express intention of then suing users of that software in the future for copyright infringement.
2) Even though the code is developed anonymously, how does that protect me, as the user
So the end result is that... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the Open Source software will be written outside of the US where US patent law doesn't hold. And as Open Source people aren't SELLING the software into the US its going to be tough to sue them.
This would of course be bad news until we think that Linus and Alan Cox aren't from the US anyway and Open Source is really taking off in European Govs.
Come on folks, move to Europe, claim political asylum.
Re:WIPO and patent law harmonization. (Score:3)
China has recently entered into an intellectual property treaty with the U.S.
Bruce
China can collapse the US economy at any time (Score:5, Interesting)
A Chinese boycott of sales to America is the least of their power.
China is the main financier of the American government's debt. Yes, that $400 to $500 billion Baby Bush has put us in the hole for fighting his family's personal vindetta in Iraq at America's expense (both in tax dollars and human lives).
If China gets really annoyed with us, they can simply stop buying US Bonds and put the government (and the economy) into freefall overnight. Yes, thanks to Bush's unprecedented deficit China could engineer the complete collapse of our economy, and probably our ability to govern, that easily.
If they decide they don't want to go that far, they could do anything from a boycot more limited than you describe (refuse to export some product we really need and watch our economy spasm without actually collapsing), to invading and annexing Taiwan (goodbye affordable computing for the next 5-10 years).
Really, Bush has put us so far into hawk to the Chinese that they really can call the shots, anytime they like. They just haven't seen any advantage in doing so so blatently or crassly
But with America's current diplomatic and strategic incompetence, one is forced to wonder how much longer it will be, and conclude "probably not much."
Revolt (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear story after story about Americans losing, or put at risk of losing, their freedoms. Freedom to create (stifled by patents, copyright, trademark). Freedom from federal income tax (which is alleged to never have been legislated). Freedom from unreasonable search (illegal NSA wiretaps). Gerrymandering and political lobbying that reduce the voting power regular citizens. Etc.
Do we just grumble about these things and suck it up? Are we suffering from how-to-boil-a-frog syndrom, as the majority of German citizens did when the Nazi party seized power before WW2?
Don't get me wrong - I am *not* advocating violence or illegal activity. But I am curious about why peope haven't gotten pissed-off enough to revolt.
Re:Revolt (Score:5, Insightful)
To get a revolt, you need people free enough to plan one, and who have a specific, tangible, grudge against the current powers that be. The current trend in the USA is to slowly erode the first without affecting the second. As long as the illusion is maintained that the next election could 'fix' things, you can keep this up right until the point at which the populace has no effective freedom, at which point you can do whatever you want.
The next step as freedoms diminish is to start reducing the size of the middle class: those who have money and time for lesuire, but do not have any power in the system. The powerful don't revolt: they run the place, and peasents don't revolt, they are too worried about their next meal. The only ones you have to worry about are those in between. Watch for further economic reforms that favor big business.
Re:Revolt (Score:3, Insightful)
The next step? Poverty rates through 2004 [census.gov]. This reflects people moving from the lower middle class, as well as higher population growth in the lowest income ranges.
Higher gas prices? Reduce the discretionary income of the middle and lower classes disproportionately. How about food, also excluded from inflation statistics? Higher gas pr
Re:Revolt (Score:3, Insightful)
Take away our bread and circuses.
Re:Revolt (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans dont really love freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
So Microsoft spies on us while we use windows. So what? I don't actually notice. It doesn't inconvenience me in any direct way. And windows works the way I expect it to. I don't have to learn nearly as much as I do in order to use Linux, and all my games play on it out of the box. Oh, and I don't even have to install it...it comes on my computer. Convenience all around, so that's where my money winds up going.
The list of candidates to vote on is usually kept quite small. Sure, the two party system eliminates options, and our method of voter tallying is statistically absurd, but it is so darn CONVIENANT. For most of us, there is an obvious choice...the party choice. I don't have to bother listening to platforms or researching relevant issues...I just vote for my party and suddenly I am a good patriot with a license to complain. Isn't convenience wonderful?
Sure airport searches are a bit inconvenient if I am the one who gets searched...but the odds are low. Usually its some other guy who gets searched, and that makes me feel safer. Maybe they record and traffic my personal information, but I don't really feel any sting for that (for the most part, I don't even know its going on). I can fly anywhere and feel like my interests are safely guarded by the government. The convenience of this feeling far outweighs the minor inconveniences of the occasional long wait to get in the airplane.
So I can't copy DVD's. Oh well, I guess I will just pay them again. An extra fifteen bucks won't kill me. Breaking the law and risking punishment just so I can make personal backups is just a bit too inconvenient. Region encoding? What's that? I've never felt it's sting, because I buy my DVD's at Wall mart...not from some weird store way out in Europe...the shipping time alone is just too much, not to mention the extra cost. What I have got is convenient enough, and the added convenience you geeks talk about seems a little superfluous and way too much work to obtain. Nah, I like things the way they are.
So what if my cell phone calls are monitored and my position is tracked? So what if the providers are overcharging a bit because they can get away with it? Cell phones are an exemplar of convenience. So what if my internet usage is tracked and recorded? All they would ever do is prevent me from breaking the law anyway, right? That's ok with me. So long as the only people who get their rights abused by all this monitoring and information-tracking are a few social rabble-rousers, and not me, there really is no problem. I like all this convenience much better than the pains of actually making myself aware of what's going on and making sacrifices to ensure my continued privacy and freedom.
Power is a lot of work to keep hold of. Far too inconvenient. Let the politicians and big corporations fight over it. I am better off without any of it at all. Good riddance.
And God bless America!
Re:Revolt (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom from income tax? Our constitution says congress can tax us to raise an army.
If they tax our tea and legal documents AND stop us from voting, then we will revolt.
The closest we have come to having no voting rights was the last predential ellection, where the liberal parts of Ohio had far too few voting booths (and several-hour waits to vot) while the conservative parts of the state had no lines at all to
Re:Revolt (Score:5, Informative)
Closer than that: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=385 [gregpalast.com] . Pick a largely African-American district near a military base. Do a mass mailing there. Mark the envelopes "Do not forward". Collect the bounces from the addresses of African-Americans who are in Iraq. Build a spreadsheet of them. You now have the ability to walk into the election offices and say that everyone on the list doesn't really live at their registered address. If the would-be Democratic voter walks into a polling station, they can still fill out a provisional ballot. If still overseas, their absentee ballot will be treated as invalid and simply not counted.
You also have no voting rights if someone opaquely controls the counting of the votes.
Re:Revolt (Score:3, Insightful)
History has its own examples that it usually takes too much as you pointed out with the Nazi experience in Germany.
Add to it that north americans are not really the kind to "revolt" as many european citizen would do. As an example, many laugh at countries like France for their union and endless strikes, but that's how changes in politics happen. One of the problem I see here in NA is that you can get sued for breathing air. This scares enough people to keep the mob in control.
Legal threats, fear instilled
Re:Revolt (Score:2)
Jaysyn
Test of obviousness (Score:5, Insightful)
Invite a bunch of new comsci grads who are unfamiliar with the patent and ask them to solve the specific problem in hand: mapping relational data to objects and see what they come up with. I am certain that most of them will have some sort of an automated object mapper.
I have 'invented' this technique a few times over the course of my working life in different projects. 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 4.5 years ago, each time for a different platform and each time it was fully automated (the last one was called a Persistance Facade, it was a Java implementation with objects being populated by reflection from database and database being populated from objects, everything was done automagically with an XML file that drove the conversion, and this XML file could also be generated automagically either from the DB or from the objects.)
It is just a ridiculously obvious idea and anyone familiar with basics of programming (not even necessarily OO, flat structures can be populated the same way and I had to do that 10 years ago in C,) and databases should be able to come up with some sort of a workable solution in quite a short time period.
I bet 99.99% of all patents are just as obvious for the people trained in the field in question.
Soon, all development will come from outside USA (Score:5, Insightful)
-Patent litigation will become part of the development process.
-Overseas competition will be able to release their version much sooner because they don't bother playing the SW patent game.
Would you move to a free country? (Score:4, Interesting)
Would you move from America to...
Canada? (Close, same language, but America's bitch in IP legislation issues)
Sweden? (Far away, different language, more intellectual freedom)
China? (Farther away, different language, sometimes repressive and corrupt government)
What is this kind of freedom worth to you?
Re:Would you move to a free country? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Would you move to a free country? (Score:3, Insightful)
I was born and raised in the US. I've lived here all of my life, and I like it here. I spent alot of time and energy learning how to think, write code/OS's/programming languages etc. So that I could write better software and put it in the hands of the world because it's fun, and I'm tired of seeing the crap software being used by the masses.
If I have to move to Finland to be free to write code, I might just do
Re:Would you move to a free country? (Score:4, Interesting)
My partner and I are at the point where we can see retirement in the next several years. At that point, neither of us want to keep living in a house in the suburbs, so we're talking about where we want to spend the rest of our lives.
*If* we move overseas, which is maybe a 20-30% chance, then I'd lean strongly towards an OSS-friendly country. I'd like to think I can spend a sizeable chunk of my retirement time writing and/or improving FOSS, because I've done OK out of using it and would like to give more back than I have to date. If doing that means I have to worry about infringing patents etc., then I'll give serious thought to what I'll have to do to remove that concern, and if we're already planning on moving countries anyway, finding a non-software-patent regime starts to become a significant factor.
For what it's worth, quite a few of my work buddies are thinking along similar lines. It's conceivable that this could result in a noticeable brain drain of still-highly-productive IT staff in their 40s-50s-60s over the next several years, and that might start to have a financial impact down the track. Even us taking our retirement dollars out of the country and spending them elsewhere would make a dent in local economies.
Key point (Score:4, Insightful)
This really seems to me to be the core of what's wrong with US (and soon, possibly EU, according to the article) IP law.
If it is a technical invention - a new technology - then you file a patent. That way you can profit from your innovation.
If it is something creative - something that anybody could have done, but you did it in your particular way and thus created something unique - then you are protected by copyright and thus are legally identified as the creative source, so you can be credited for your creativity.
Software falls between the cracks of the law, and so is protected by both. You have a category of products that you can't mimic without paying for it and that you can't replicate period. As far as I can see, this is only an issue because that which is protected by copyright - information - is now completely free to reproduce thanks to technology.
So, the whole problem boils down to exactly the same thing as music and DRM. It's just that the litigiousness of the US has brought it rapidly to a financial and legal head there. The only way it can be resolved while maintaining society's appetite for innovation is to come up with a new way of classifying the rights of the originator of information - be it technical or creative.
I am not the person to come up with that solution, but I do wish people would stop banging on about the brush-fire conflicts and start trying to figure out a solution to the cause of the problem.
Wow (Score:2)
Almost every serious OO developer who starts working with databases comes up with their own object-relational mapping implementation.
Economists would call this (Score:2)
Our hope: making influencial people depend on OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Apache, Python, Perl, Samba, etc. Public institutions as are becoming increasingly dependent on FOSS as well: computer science / physics departments use Linux. City governments are playing around with OpenOffice.org and Linux. Even various military systems are now based on a complete FOSS stack: Linux, GCC, etc.
So here's my hope: the politically influential organizations that *use* FOSS will out-muscle the Microsofts and IBMs of the world who advocate for software patents. And when a showdown occurs, software patents will go away.
Another possibility is that India and China will start producing far more softare patents than the US does. I think we'd see the U.S. government take a far weaker stance regarding international IP treaties.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:2)
No. Absolutely wrong.
Such a coordinated attack would cripple commercial uses of open source software.
We mere guys-in-the-trenches would carry on writing and using itas though nothing had changed.
And yes, before someone says it - That might well make us "criminals"... In the same way speeding, copying CDs, "experimenting" with weed in c
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely wrong, and clearly didn't read the article:
It seems very much like a hobbyist who's sharing his code with the rest of the world is being royally fucked by some vested commercial interest. Much like any other OS project could be. Wanna run the risk writing code that somebody making money off the same thing will get pissed off and decide to sue you personally for millions of dollars because you're fucking with their business model? No?
It doesn't matter that we're all criminals already for other things anyway -- that's part of a greater problem in our government and not related to the problem at hand. This is something that should have been nipped in the bud, as Perens says, a decade ago.
C
Patent Commons patents are not pledged for defense (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, some of the patents in the patent commons can be withdrawn at any time. It seems to be a half-hearted effort. Why? Look at the companies on OSDL's board. They are the ones that most profit from software patenting.
If you want to understand the truth about the patent commons, start at LWN's coverage of their disclosures [lwn.net].
There is another project called Open Innovation Network, started by Novell, that is supposed to contain patents that really are dedicated for defensive use.
Bruce
Question... What if OSS gets there first...? (Score:2, Insightful)
When the company attempts to assert patent rights over the OSS project, can the OSS project invalidate the patent by proving they came up with the idea first?
Tech will go on, but the people? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can toss a big boulder into the path of a river and -- guess what -- the river doesn't stop. It routes around the problem. That is what open source projects will do. Patent suit says stop using method X, well we just invent method Y to do the same thing without infringing the patent. Project goes ahead. You cannot stop this with patent suits.
In fact, this is not endemic to open source; it happens in all areas. If you block something with a patent that people want bad enough, they will route around it, whether legally or illegally (c.f. the motion picture industry). This often leads to quality patented inventions falling into disuse because the patentholder is a bully. Something else is quickly invented to fill the same market niche and well all go happily on our way.
Now of course the trick is that rational settlements may not be possible, e.g., ACME Patent Troll Co. sues Poor Developer Harold for $1 billion in damages and won't settle for his ceasing to use the method. Even if it turns out favorably for PDH, he could be bankrupted by the proceedings. That is what we need legislation about -- the bullying of persons and families by giant corporations with near-infinite legal funds, where the cost of defending against their allegations by itself is a de facto award of damages: trial and conviction without due process.
The water that shattered the rock (Score:3, Insightful)
Freeze the water, shatter the rock.
End Game: M$ Wins. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of big dumb companies who will be happy to license your ability to use and improve free software. M$ and IBM and other companies pushing for software patents will be happy to claim ownership of everyones' hard work. That's what this is really about, isn't it?
Problem seems to be (Score:3, Interesting)
Letter to your Senator (Score:3, Informative)
Notice I put the additional information link at the bottom. Probably no one will look at it, that's why it's at the bottom. The Amicus Brief I inlined. Since it is being heard by the supreme court, it's a Washington issue and more likely to actually be of interest to those inside the beltway.
This isnt about open source.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are the ruin of the free market (Score:3, Insightful)
In comes the patent. And here's where it gets ugly. While, as the article said, patents were supposed to push innovation and competition, they harm both: A normal innovator cannot afford a patent, and competition is stifled because who holds the patent may dictate who may produce.
In the world of software it's even worse than in the real world. Frivulous patents for the equivalent of a toothpick aside, there are many things that can be done "right" only one way. There is often only one good algo for a certain task, with all the others falling behind. Should a company own the patent to a, say, search algo that is magnitudes faster than competing algorithms, this company has the monopoly on databases, if they so desire.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is as anti-capitalist and anti-free market as it gets. Our market system relies on the equilibrium between supplyer and demander, on the fact that price is made at the market by the rules of supply and demand. If one side has the power to overrule this and create monopolies to dictate price or, worse, competition, the free market is dead.
It's not much different with DRM, btw, where the format providers may dictate what kind of devices may be created. BluRay as well as HDDVD devices only get the ok (and the key) if they agree to implement a secure data path. You MUST NOT create a device that has none. Now, you could of course create a "free" format, but then those machines that play HDDVD/BluRay must not play your format, and the content industry will not provide content on your format (out of self interest). -> free trade dead.
As long as patents exist in the current form, we're going to steer towards something that caused the downfall of the Soviet Regimes. They, too, produced goods the consumer did not want. They had different reasons, but the result is essentially the same: The goods manufactured do not match the demand of the users. And so far, there is no law that force us to buy AT ALL.
Shame on you Bruce (Score:3)
What an amazing coincidence that this starts to happen shortly after you get advertising.
It is under review, that is all.
You should get 'recognized' people in the indutry to help advise congress and the USPTO.
Patents do work. This business of Software and business patents are obusive of the Patent intent and should be abolished, the idea of patent is a good one.
As someone who had a company try to use something I patented, I was able to defend my patent. So I may be biased. I wouldn't want to cloud anyones opinion with fact and real world examples though.
Patent suit against Red Hat and Jboss Hibernate... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Funny)
Price of hiring lawyers to take down developers: Several thousand dollars per developer
Price of eliminating all of your competition: Priceless
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Funny)
price to whack the complaintants legal team, $30-$50K per head,
cost of making criminal activity cheaper than a legal defense, unestimatable!
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
This is sort of like saying that rhinos and pandas can't become extinct because we have been trying to eradicate rats for centuries, and they are doing well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Pathetically ridiculous, I know, and yet, that's the way it is today. How can one defend such a horrendously biaised set of laws is still a mystery to me.
As far as suing is concerned, plenty of **AA consortiums have already answered that question.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out the Constitution. It is aware of the freedom of ideas, but when that idea has been reduced to a useful product, then Congress is given the power to enact legislation to protect that invention. The purpose is to encourage inventors to i
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
We no longer need to encourage "inventors" anymore (in the software field), the Free/OSS Development model is proof of that. Thus, the patent system no longer promotes the progress of Science (in the area of Computer Science) and should be struck down - at least for software patents anyway.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
Which they will if they get sued into oblivion.
TW
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Beat that, they'll move to encryption. The company's can't win, and most of the patents are overtly obvious anyways and should be thrown out. If anything, Open Source will likely cause a patent revolution for that reason alone (just as downloaded music is changing the face of copyright as we know it).
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll work quite well. Much OSS development is done commercially -- less frequently as part of a company founded around supporting a piece of OSS, and more frequently as a part of operating a company which is building its underlying infrastructure on OSS components. If OSS is heavily encumbered with patents, then that corporate use (and corresponding support) will disappear. Sure, some OSS will still exist -- but if it's only a spare-time activity, rather than something one can spend 8 hours a day on, that provides far less time for it to flourish; this is particularly true as developers get older and have a wider array of outside responsibilities.
I've been doing work on open source software on behalf of my employers for the entire duration of my employment history. Work will become much less fun and much more work should that go away.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4274811.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Most of the world does not recognise software patents and this could end up as a wake up call for the gov. as work starts to leave the US. They may finally realise that this is a bad thing for the US. In the short term this will be a bad thing for OSS as it will lose a lot of contributors but in the long term it could be a good thing for the US if the rest of the world moves on and gov
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the copyright laws which are becoming more and more draconian?
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, sure, you're right. So OSS software ends up achieving the same lofty status as Kaza. I'm sure my company will jump right on the OSS bandwagon if that's the case. I'm sure OSS will have no problem attracting the best and brightest programers once they realize they get to be genuine lawbreakers.
Viva la Open Source! Long live the revolution!
Personally, I'd rather we, as a society, took the steps necessary to keep OSS from being marginalized and going underground in the first place.
TW
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:2)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
You most certainly can be sued for patent infringement by simply releasing source code, but probably only for contributory infringement (although in case of program claims, the source code may event directly infringe on the patent).
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
This is unfortunate for the US. If the US doesn't do something about their patent system, it is very likely that they will fall behind China and India in terms of innovation.
But the U.S. is doing something about it. They're pressuring China and India to adopt US-style IP laws.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what Perens is talking about here -- the threat of a patent lawsuit could stop the motor of the movement. That threat is escalating!
Stay tuned...
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Most OSS software is so entrenched, so much a part of the current workings of the Internet, that to try and sue it away is a futile gesture at best. What corporation wants to take the brunt of the backlash when they successfully sue an OSS provider, forcing them to remove their software, only to have some major Net functiionality suddenly become unavailable? In this day and age, publicity is more important than product (think Arthur Andersen) and no company wants to be thought of us as the bully tha
Re:Isn't this kind of a dupe? (Score:2)
Re:Isn't this kind of a dupe? (Score:2)
I like technocrat because it has less crap stories, and I have a four digit number there.
Re:People NEVER learn when it comes to corporation (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight: if we make the government (who you say is backing large companies in "enforcing" IP) get out of the way so that the large companies are unfettered to do so themselves... what's different? Open Source still gets crushed. OK, so it's a different lawyer at the controls.
Granted, the whole mess isn't taxpayer funded anymore. But innovation still dies, and we aren't going to be getting a tax rebate anytime soon. The government will just put their money elsewhere (such as, foe example, picking up the tab at strip clubs for victims of natural disasters).
Re:People NEVER learn when it comes to corporation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People NEVER learn when it comes to corporation (Score:2)
That seems equally as alarming.
Re:People NEVER learn when it comes to corporation (Score:2)
Re:People NEVER learn when it comes to corporation (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, sir, you're an anarchist.
Communism is about setting up a large entity (Government or otherwise) to control production and resources as common property of all citizens.
Re:They have every right to their works (Score:2, Informative)
What part of "there's prior art" do you not understand?
You keep using that phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
There's prior art--big whoop. That, and five bucks, will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Prior art isn't some silver bullet that will lay waste to any patent. Prior art is just that: any work existing prior to the work included in the patent relating to the art of the work included in the patent.
The existence of prior art does not automatically invalidate the patent. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say, if it is not the case that all patents include prior art, then it certainly true of 99%+.
For example, I've invented an internal combustion engine which utilizes an innovative, non-obvious process to enable me to build a car which gets 100 miles to a gallon of extra virgin olive oil. However my process only works with oil produced by a specific method. In fact, it only works with oil from a special method that has been patented.
That special, patented olive-oil-producing method is prior art for my invention and would be included in my patent application, but has no bearing on whether my work is patent-worthy or not.
And let's say the implementation of my new engine is in a car with a specific type of existing transmission. That also would be prior art. And that also would have no bearing on the validity of any patent granted for my work.
I don't know why the concept of prior art is so hard for the
Is every computer program the intellectual property of the creator of the language used to write the program? You can't write the program without the language--it's prior art. If you were documenting a program, you'd certainly include some reference to the programming language used--it's prior art.
But you could certainly devise some innovative, non-obvious implementation of that language that would allow you to say, "this is my program."
Re:IBM? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Didn't IBM and other large players pledge their patent portfolios to FOSS in case of cases like this?"
Having a patent portfolio for defensive purposes is only useful for preventing suits from other manufacturers who want to produce stuff without infringing on those patents. They will be happy to swap their patent rights for yours. But a patent troll holds only patents and doesn't make anything. He gets no benefits from cross licensing. So it doen't matter if IBM has pledged patents X, Y, and Z to open source. A troll who has a patent on W will still sue.
From reading the posts here it is clear that most people have no idea how serious this is. RMS has been warning about the dangers of software patents for at least 15 years. He was right but has always been too readily dismissed as an extremist. It will only take one or two successful patent infringement lawsuits before the legal sharks smell blood and the feeding frenzy begins. Don't think you'll be saved because the patents are for "obvious" ideas (which, of course, they are). Once a patent is granted the legal presumption is that it's valid and it is very, very expensive to overturn it. And there is a high degree of capriciousness -- if you are right in a patent dispute there's maybe a 50% chance you'll actually win the suit -- if you don't go bankrupt first. That's why businesses usually just fork over the exortion payments.
Re:IBM? (Score:3, Informative)
Bruce
Re:I'm confused - what is Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
By that logic there you can't sue filesharers for passing around mp3s. Obviously, you can, and people do. More importantly, though, most of us want to be able to use and create free software legally, and we want to be able to take credit for our own work. Not being able to do these things is a HUGE deal.
Re:This isn't like Perens (Score:3, Informative)
I have never sold patent insurance, nor am I associated with the company that attempted to create a patent insurance business any longer. It might have helped protect us if that business had actually been able to sell patent insurance, but that has not worked so far.
Bruce