| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Fork ahead...?
Fork ahead...?
Posted Jul 10, 2007 15:56 UTC (Tue) by vmole (subscriber, #111)In reply to: Fork ahead...? by dfsmith
Parent article: Samba Adopts GPLv3 for Future Releases
Well, those companies have been working with a GPL2 Samba, not a BSD Samba. So if their current usage and distribution is legal, then it's unlikely that GPL3 Samba will be a problem. Most of the commercial products that ship Samba use it as a component, and provide nifty (or not) proprietary frontends for configuration and monitoring. GPL3 doesn't prevent that.
(Log in to post comments)
Fork ahead...?
Posted Jul 10, 2007 23:49 UTC (Tue) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link]
Read GPLv3 section 11 para. 2--3.
By the wording, the following (hypothetical situation) is arguable.
I make a box with some whizzy patented feature (that I invested many $ into), that I can turn on by adding a line to the Samba code. I have to distribute the modified Samba---no problem. But para. 3 says I now have to grant "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license" for that patent.
Now any other company is licensed to our (hardware) patent. This greatly reduces the value of it. (And the Chinese can surely undercut our hardware and development costs.) This is not very attractive (except to those industrious Chinese, of course).
One can fairly argue that we wouldn't have a product at all without Samba. But I would also argue that GPLv3 Samba would lose valuable developer testing in this situation, possibly to its detriment. The question is, just how valuable is that developer time?*
* The comments above would indicate "not very". In which case v3 may flourish.
Fork ahead...?
Posted Jul 12, 2007 14:54 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]
Well, the scenario you describe would almost certainly run afoul of the GPLv2, because your patent would restrict the rights of downstream users of the software. There has been quite a bit of discussion on this topic, and there's also explicit patent-related language in GPLv2 that covers other cases. Really, the only change in GPLv3 is that a couple of tricky loopholes dreamt up by Microsoft have been fixed, and that everything is much more explicit.
Fork ahead...?
Posted Jul 12, 2007 14:55 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
You snipped some pretty important things out of your quotes there.
When you cliped "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license" you realy ment "Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.", right?
Because there is a huge difference.
Anyways your mythical hardware patent has nothing to do with the software. Hardware is hardware and software is software; seperate things. Your granting license to use that software, not to anything else. The hardware your providing is unaffected by the software license, so your patent is safe.
That's also assuming that the Chinese give a crap about patents, which they don't.
What they will do is take your patented ideas, violate your patents. They will sell the hardware in countries that do not honor U.S. patents, and thus are completely isolated from any U.S. patent law. Because of the lack of need to pay for patents and such they will undercut competing hardware coming out of the USA.
Then they will use the profits from these sales to then turn around and hire lawyers in the U.S. to setup a legal entities (aka patent trolls) to buy new patents from the government, which you would have to pay for, since your based out of the U.S.
This, combined with the legal overhead you have to deal with on a day to day basis related to all this crap, will have considurably higher expenses then your chinese friends, who are happily putting you out of business.
Good luck trying to get the government to risk billions in dollars worth of agricultural exports with China, and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of (very politically active) midwest farmers, as well as other billions of dollars in trade in order to get in a trade dispute with China to help defend your little NAS business from that evil (mostly state-owned, mind you) chinese corporation (who probably already makes the majority of the parts you use in your product anyways).