LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 5, 2012

Akademy: Defensive publications

One way to reduce the number of software patents that are issued is to document interesting ideas before someone locks them up. Defensive publications are a way to express those ideas in an accessible form for patent examiners so that they will be aware of prior art during the application process. Open Invention Network (OIN) chief operating officer Raffi Gostanian came to Akademy in Tallinn, Estonia to describe defensive publications, explain how OIN can help in the process of creating them, and to encourage KDE developers to start filing them.

OIN has a broad mandate to create a patent "no-fly zone" around Linux, Gostanian said. It does that by purchasing patents which can be used by members. It entices companies to join by having interesting patents available. OIN focuses on particular segments of the market, like finance or automotive, to put together groups of patents in those areas. Companies can join OIN if they promise not to use their patents against Linux.

As part of the Linux Defenders project, OIN has also worked on various efforts to invalidate patents either before or after they issued (through the Peer to Patent projects). That depends on finding prior art that shows the idea was not new at the time of the application. Defensive publications are a way to codify ideas from the free and open source software world that could be used to reject patent applications.

Defensive publications don't have to be about a program or something that has been implemented, they could just be an idea that someone has (or has had). Linux Defenders will publish the defensive publications in a database that can be searched by patent examiners (on ip.com) so that patent applications will be stopped from proceeding, he said.

Patent suits

There have been lots of patent suits already, and there will be more. Typically, it is not a single patent that is used in lawsuits, but a cluster of related patents. There are entities out there antagonistic toward Linux, "we know that", Gostanian said. It is difficult for some to see how they can "compete with free", so they turn to the court system. One way to try to combat open source is to claim that "you get what you pay for", but Android serves as a counterexample, which is part of why it attracts so much lawsuit attention.

Gostanian pointed to the lawsuit filed by Microsoft against Barnes & Noble for its Android-based Nook tablet as an example of the tactics used. There was a "war of words" between the companies about the suit, but in the end, Barnes & Noble ended up in a relationship with Microsoft. He is certain that the next Nook will not be running Android, which shows that sometimes suits are filed to force outcomes other than one side paying patent royalties.

Another example he cited was Microsoft's FAT patent (really a patent on a way to have long file names in VFAT), which was applied for in 1996 and granted in 1998. It went through the reexamination process, which upheld the patent; so did several courts, which emboldened Microsoft, who went on to use it for patent aggression.

But, more recently, an administrative law judge for the US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that the patent is invalid based on a 1992 post by Linus Torvalds. In that note to comp.os.minix, Torvalds essentially describes the patented technique as an idea for the Minix filesystem. It was not implemented, but just the description of the idea was enough for the judge.

Had the patent examiner known of that, it is likely the patent would not have been granted. In that case, there would have been "less FUD around Linux" and the lawsuits would not have happened, Gostanian said.

Attacking the root cause

When you have a problem—bad software patents being issued for example—you want to look for a root cause. In this case, he asked, is the real problem that people are filing for junk patents? That is sometimes true, but in most cases people think they are describing something innovative.

It takes three or four years after an application is filed before a patent examiner looks at it; when they do, they have around eight hours to consider the patent. That is the total amount of time they can spend, which includes some amount of back and forth with the filer. There are things they rely on to try to find prior art, but that generally does not include scientific publications, technical reports, conference proceedings or talks, blog postings, mailing lists, and so on. The examiners don't have a lot of time, and it would be difficult for them to find important prior art in that time. The idea behind defensive publications is to make it easier for them to do their job, Gostanian said.

Defensive publications are "in a sense" the "anti-patent", he said. By taking various concepts and ideas that have already been "invented" and making them easier to find, those ideas can get in front of the examiners during the application process. Linux Defenders will be working with teams or individuals to help them prepare defensive publications to be filed at ip.com. The filing cost will be picked up by Linux Defenders as well. The idea is that it is easier (and cheaper) to invalidate a patent before it is granted rather than doing so once it has been.

Unlike patents, defensive publications are fairly simple documents. Typically one or two pages of text is all that is required, along with a figure that describes the interaction between the components. It "could literally take two hours" to create one, he said. The short length is helpful to the examiners who don't want to wade through a long description. Defensive publications can certainly be longer than a page or two, but they don't need to be, he said.

Gostanian encouraged anyone in the audience with an "idea that you think is cool" or one that they are enthusiastic about to consider defensive publication. It doesn't matter if the idea has ever been implemented, and additional defensive publications can be made on newer iterations of the idea, each of which has the potential to stop patents.

It costs nothing to do a defensive publication as OIN will pay for filing those that come in via Linux Defenders. In addition, Linux Defenders will review and assist in writing the document. "Whatever's necessary, we'll do", Gostanian said, to assist in getting more defensive publications filed.

Creating defensive publications is something concrete that developers or projects can do to help fight bad patents. Each submission to ip.com gets a public number assigned to it that can be used in resumes or CVs to publicize one's involvement, though defensive publications can also be submitted anonymously as well. While there are lots of different opinions about the patent system, it isn't going away anytime soon—if ever—so this is one thing that can be done to reduce patent problems in the interim.

There are tens of thousands of defensive publications in existence already, Gostanian said in answer to a question from the audience, though most have not come via OIN. This is the first conference he has spoken at to publicize the effort, though he will be speaking at GUADEC and other team members will be attending COSCUP to help bring the message to developers at those events. While "tens of thousands" sounds big, he said, they are scattered around in many different technical fields. Linux Defenders would like to see a more concentrated effort in the areas surrounding Linux and open source, eventually resulting in tens of thousands being filed via the project.

[ The author would like to thank KDE e.V. for travel assistance to Tallinn for Akademy. ]

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Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live

Creating an open device is a difficult challenge; the software is (mostly) there, but the hardware is a different story. Aaron Seigo has been working on the Vivaldi tablet as part of the Make Play Live effort and reported on some of the hurdles that have been encountered trying to produce the device at Akademy. There are lots of pieces that go into such a device, so finding a combination that works and can be sold is a non-trivial task.

Plasma Active

Plasma Active—the touch-enabled version of KDE's Plasma environment—came out of a discussion that various people working on Plasma had about the technology and asking "where do we go from here?", Seigo said. KDE has a desktop suite, with office, email, and many other applications, but "is that all we want to do?". To he and others, it felt like KDE was treading water, but the discussions made it clear that some in the project were not happy with just that.

He believes very strongly in freedom and technology, and he started looking beyond the desktop and laptops where KDE has traditionally been focused. When you look at mobile devices, set top boxes, and other systems like those, you don't see the freedom and openness that we have come to expect. There is an inherent need for some humans to hack, but devices are "increasingly not places where you can hack, unless Apple says you can".

There is this idea that a "tablet is a tablet, a laptop is a laptop", he said, but that is "increasingly silly". There is a continuum of devices, without sharp divisions between them. We have started to see others picking up on that, and releasing hybrid devices recently, like a media center that is controlled by a tablet or phone, tablets with keyboards, and so on.

So, Plasma Active arose out of Plasma Netbook and Plasma Desktop. It provides one KDE and Qt-based technology that can be used across all kinds of devices. The difference between Plasma Active and the netbook/desktop versions is 10-15,000 lines of code—out of a code base of some third-of-a-million lines. So there are "tiny differences" between the two, and things written for one will work on the other. This is a "compelling reason" to use Plasma Active on all these different kinds of devices, Seigo said.

Android: best friend and worst enemy

Seigo cited Android as the "best friend and worst enemy of open devices". It uses the Linux kernel, and it is great that there are so many devices out there running Linux. But Google does no GPL enforcement, which results in mostly binary-only devices. For device manufacturers, getting Android to boot is the end goal so that the device can be sold. Once they can deliver a working binary kernel to their customers, they are done.

We are dealing with cultural and business barriers when trying to deliver open devices, he said. All the manufacturing for these devices is in China, increasingly the design is being done there as well. To build open devices, you must work with the cultures of Asia, but most KDE developers are based in Europe or North America and are not familiar with those cultures. In addition, the manufacturers are "all about volume" and, at least so far, open devices are not selling in quantities that make them interesting. He is not just reporting these problems "because it sucks", he said, but because "I think there are things we can do about it together".

He asked: Can we overcome these problems? His experience shows that it is "a very big mountain to climb", but it is something that the community has to take on itself. These problems are not something that big companies are interested in, so "we need to take our destiny in our own hands".

From an implementation standpoint, there are three pieces of software that need to work well together. The kernel, which needs a user space that works with it, and a "human experience" on top of that. Seigo uses the term "human experience" rather than "user experience" because "humans are not users", he said.

As a community, KDE does the human experience part, and there are folks in the project with some experience in the other two. Seigo asked how many in the room had written a kernel module and got a few raised hands. "We need you guys", he said, and asked that they bring their friends. These days, user space is tightly coupled to the kernel, he said, so the two need to be in sync.

Plasma Active itself is ready to go to provide the human experience; version 3 will be released in the next few months. One recent addition is a "nice touch-friendly file manager", Seigo said, and Plasma Active is more than just a desktop shell. It is enabling other applications, like Calligra and Marble, to work well on touch devices. In addition, a recent two or three day effort turned Okular into a touch enabled e-book reader using QML.

Lots of code has been taken from the desktop for Plasma Active, but there are parts that will flow back to Plasma in the future as well. Many KDE applications can be made touch-friendly relatively easily, he said, and developers of any applications that might ever run on a tablet, phone, set top box, etc. should be thinking about that. When he hears application developers talking about separating the business logic from the presentation, that's a sign things are headed in the right direction

Vivaldi progress

Seigo and a partner started Make Play Live (MPL) to create "ethically correct devices" that are hackable. A business ecosystem has also been built around it to support the effort. The plan is to create a tablet called Vivaldi, but there have been some problems along the way.

Seigo held up the tablet, noting that it was the second revision of the hardware that was received from MPL's hardware partner. Using that hardware, the company got 98% of the way there, he said, and were demonstrating the device widely. It just needed a "little more polish" before it was ready to ship. Then, the third revision of the hardware arrived.

The new hardware looked identical—on the outside—but was "completely different" internally. MPL found out about the changes after the fact, and was not able to provide input into the new design. Because the volume of devices that MPL could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.

The earlier revision had been running a modified Mer user space atop the Android kernel distributed by the manufacturer, but that no longer works on the most recent hardware revision. There is a "solution in the pipes" to that problem, Seigo said, but that set Vivaldi back. The device manufacturers don't really want to invest in Linux per se, but want to focus on Android, which is a different thing.

In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process. "Our order is a rounding error" on the total number of units the device manufacturers are targeting. He certainly doesn't blame the hardware companies as they are focused on their bottom line. It would be great if MPL (or open devices in general) could rely on large companies to take the baton and dangle that kind of volume in front of the manufacturers, but that doesn't seem likely.

Part of the problem is that there is "little respect for the GPL" in Asia, Seigo said. When you ask for the source to the kernel for a device, you first get pointed at kernel.org. Once you make it clear that there is more needed, you will get a tarball with "amazing stuff", some of which has nothing to do with the device in question. Comparing that to what's running on the device shows differences, so you have to ask: "Now can we really get the source?". There is also often resistance from the hardware salespeople to the whole idea of getting the source as they think the company will go bankrupt if they give it away. When setting out on this task, Seigo said that he had no idea "how hard it would be to get GPL source" from the vendors.

The MPL partner network consists of nine companies so far who are concentrating on various pieces of the problem, like human experience or device integration. There is room for more hardware and software companies in that network, he said. If some other company were to come out with a an open device, he would see that as a success for the project, even though it might be a competitor to Vivaldi.

Human-centric experience

The MPL philosophy is one of "human-centric experience" rather than the "app-centric experience" offered by other mobile OS vendors (e.g. Google and Apple). Vivaldi and other MPL devices are meant to be usable from the outset and not require the purchase of a lot of apps. That limits the "app store story" a bit, but it makes for a more compelling device. When he puts a Vivaldi tablet into people's hands, they start immediately talking about how they want to use it, Seigo said.

He noted that while tech pundits have written off the tablet market as a two-horse race, they are not seeing the full picture because MPL devices will not be competing in the same space. "If tech pundits were food critics, they would be fired," he said. He likened the way pundits looked at things to a food critic who said that French food is just great, so "Italian food will never sell". Once devices start shipping, "we'll do just fine", because MPL is not competing in the same space as iPad and Android.

When asked about where an interested person might be able to find paying work on the MPL project, Seigo noted that some of the partners have been employing people to work on it, as has his company, Coherent Theory LLC. That model is not sustainable in the long term, but once devices start shipping, there will be more money available for that kind of thing. There are volunteers as well, of course; "not everything is done for money", he said.

Enlisting aid from KDE developers and other interested people was one of the themes of Seigo's talk. Much has been accomplished, but there is lots still to be done. MPL needs "more people who care" to "join us and make this a reality". He and others are committed to making open devices available, with some help they can get there faster.

[ The author would like to thank KDE e.V. for travel assistance to Tallinn for Akademy. ]

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Updates and an announcement from LWN

LWN prefers to report news from the Linux development community over news about itself. But there have been some requests recently for a status update. Beyond that, we have some important news to pass on to our readers. So please bear with us for a brief exercise in journalistic self-examination.

Toward the beginning of this year, we announced our desire to bring in another author/editor with the goals of making the operation more robust and, eventually, expanding our content mix. That process seemingly came to an end with our announcement that Nathan Willis was joining the staff at the end of April. That whole process has gone better than expected, and LWN is better for it. But there is a part of that story that we have not been able to tell until now.

We had a surprising number of strong candidates for the position at LWN. In the end, it came down to two people, either of whom would have been an outstanding addition to LWN's staff. After agonizing over the decision for a while, we realized that the skills of the two candidates complemented each other nicely and that what we really needed to do was to hire both of them. Causing that to happen took a while — our second candidate is a busy person who needed some time to make a change — but things are finally falling into place.

Thus, we are pleased to announce that our other new editor will be Michael Kerrisk. Michael describes himself this way:

We have big plans for Michael; he'll be supplementing our kernel-oriented coverage and helping us to expand it in a number of related areas including, possibly, embedded systems and software development. Expect to see his work showing up on LWN's pages later this month.

This move is a bit of a risk on everybody's part for the simple reason that LWN's current cash flow is not sufficient to carry two new editors. The good news is that we have been able to set aside some reserves over the last couple of years, so we have plenty of time in which to ramp things up and get back to a sustainable operating condition. Getting there will definitely require that we find ways to increase our subscriber base, though.

We have a number of ideas for how that might be achieved. An expanded and broader content mix, we hope, will appeal to a wider range of readers. LWN's "new site code" just celebrated its tenth anniversary; it's no secret that it could use updating in any number of ways. We need to find ways to provide additional value to the subscribers who keep us going. There are some interesting related ideas that we wish to pursue, once time allows. And we could maybe even try actively promoting the site rather than just sort of hoping that readers will find and appreciate us.

Certainly something needs to be done. In the last two years, the number of individual subscribers has leveled out and even declined slightly—not the sort of trend we were hoping to see. Group subscriptions have been a little more robust, fortunately. Special thanks are due to our "Supporter" subscribers who exist in sufficient numbers to make a real difference. Supporters: none of you have yet exercised your unique privilege to have the beverage of your choice at LWN's expense at any conference where we are present; we may yet find ourselves having to resort to sending you yet another laptop bag instead.

If we have learned anything over the years, it's the nature of businesses that something always needs to be done. It's a rare business that just generates the money needed to sustain it without constant adjustments. It has been almost exactly ten years since we posted The end of the road, wherein we explained our conclusion that the time had come to shut LWN down. Things have improved a lot since then. We are confident that, if we think and work hard toward the creation of a site that brings more value to our readers, things will continue to improve.

LWN's greatest strength is one of the best reader communities out there. We do not thank you all anywhere near often enough. But we'll say it now: thanks for your solid support for this site since its beginning in 1998; we wouldn't be here without you. And we are very much looking forward to making LWN better in the coming months—stay tuned!

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Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

• Security: FreedomBox as a home router?; New vulnerabilities in boost, chromium, gallery3, libtiff, ...
• Kernel: Missing the AF_BUS; Better documentation: the window of naive interest; Leaping seconds and looping servers.
• Distributions: An early CyanogenMod 9.0 review; FSF on secure boot, Linaro, Oracle, ...
• Development: Data mining with Orange; GRUB 2.00; Five years of GPLv3; Why Learn C; ...
• Announcements: Boot to Gecko phones, ACTA rejected by the European Parliament, Be Bold, ...

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