Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail) [LWN.net]

Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail)

Posted Aug 1, 2003 12:49 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127)
In reply to: Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail) by cdyson37
Parent article: Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail)

You gotta appreciate the irony of accusing someone in the free-software community of patenting their own software.

Well, it's not like free software people don't patent software. Some do. Red Hat caused a bit of a ruckus last year for announcing a few patents related to ext3 and such (and insisting that they would license them freely for use in free software). Raph Levien has claimed that he owns some patents for graphics algorithms (I think it was) and has argued in favor of patent pools for free software.

You don't like software patents, I don't like software patents, but so long as they are legal in certain jurisdictions, it is no bad thing to have a portfolio for defensive purposes.

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Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail)

Posted Aug 1, 2003 15:45 UTC (Fri) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]

I wonder if patents could be used to reinforce software freedom in a
similar way to the way in which copyrights are used in the GPL.
A general public patent license would license an idea for use in
free software and not otherwise. Such patents could be accumulated
and used to counterthreaten any software patent holder who attacks
free software authors. The true objective would be to make any such
patent holder cross-license with the free software community.

(Etymological note: 'patent' derives from the Latin 'to be open'
which is the sense the word has in 'patently obvious'.)

Don't be afraid: Linux is good for you (Globe and Mail)

Posted Aug 1, 2003 21:16 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

I wonder if patents could be used to reinforce software freedom in a similar way to the way in which copyrights are used in the GPL.

Yeah, that's more or less what people mean by "patent pools". The idea is that anyone who wants to participate must license all of his own patents to the whole pool for free - a massive blanket cross-licensing agreement with anyone who cares to sign up.

That plan does cause certain philosophical difficulties, such as what happens if a free software package uses a pool-licensed patent - it is no longer really free for companies not in the pool. So an extension to the patent pool idea would be that patents in the pool would also be automatically freely licensed for use in any properly-licensed body of code (where "properly-licensed" might mean "OSI-approved-license" or "OSL-compatible" or whatever). Which seems to be what you're driving at.

The pool thing probably won't catch on because it is by nature even more viral than the GPL, in that it affects all of a company's art. But what can I say, I like the notion.