Free Software friendly patent pools [LWN.net]

Free Software friendly patent pools

Posted Aug 27, 2010 12:13 UTC (Fri) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465)
In reply to: Free Software friendly patent pools by mjw
Parent article: A very grumpy editor's thoughts on Oracle

You probably have a point - that is, attacking something well-intentioned might be counterproductive, in general, even if that something were useless in practice.

However, problems with OIN exist (why the **** do they cover only the client library of MySQL???), as pointed out also in this part [1] of the current comment thread (which I maybe previously missed).
As he points out here [2], the companies which decide what is part of "the Linux system" could freely exclude a product from protection if it were a competitor. Say, IBM could exclude MySQL from protection because it is a treat to DB2. I believe that it want, if there's no policy change - but we know that's an unreliable guarantee.
You know, a seat belt which does not do its job 100% of times is not that useful - it tries to help, but maybe he does more harm than good because it makes you feel safe while you shouldn't. Possibly, same with OIN.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/400614/
[2] http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/oins-linux-system...

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Free Software friendly patent pools

Posted Aug 27, 2010 12:50 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

If your argument is that it would be nice if more was covered by the OIN patent pool then we are in agreement. That is precisely what I am advocating. Lets petition OIN to extend their coverage if they can afford it. It seems that having more free protection if we can get it is good.