LWN: Comments on "Patents and the open-source community"

Patents and the open-source community

murukesh — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 17:00:47 +0000

I'm very interested in what the situation with software patents in India is, and why they think it's so good. IP issues rarely occupy news space in India, and rarely do foreign sites deal with Indian issues. Any clues?

Patents and the open-source community

andresfreund — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:29:22 +0000

I don't think those are comparable, due to the commonly used "or later" clause in GPL licensing allowing a lot of existing projects to migrate to GPLv3 effortlessly.

Patents and the open-source community

atai — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 19:32:04 +0000

That was kind of strange because the FSF was not the leader in putting patent protection clauses into FOSS licenses. Mozilla or Apache seemed to be the first one mentioning patents in copyright licenses. You should blame these first, right?

Patents and the open-source community

Cyberax — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 21:18:16 +0000

Currently most of the code in WebKit/Blink is BSD-licensed. All the new contributions are also BSD and it's entirely possible to build it without a single line of LGPL code being present.

Now, there's still a question of whether it will be considered a derived work of the original KHTML and the answer is probably: "Yes, for now".

Patents and the open-source community

rahulsundaram — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 17:19:24 +0000

> And on the subject of exploitative corporations, I could've sworn KHTML was >LGPLed... how did that get diluted to BSD-only in Webkit and derivatives?

What makes you think so?

https://webkit.org/licensing-webkit/

Patents and the open-source community

flussence — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:15:15 +0000

I can understand people saying the GPL3 was damaging, and it definitely didn't cause more openness as was the intent. But on the other hand, it did a very good job of weeding out the corporations that were just exploiting GPL2'ed code as a free lunch and never reciprocating.

(And on the subject of exploitative corporations, I could've sworn KHTML was LGPLed... how did that get diluted to BSD-only in Webkit and derivatives?)

Patents and the open-source community

pboddie — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 11:49:12 +0000

Are "good folks" ones that offer works to others but who reserve the right to prevent those others from taking advantage of the promises made to them when receiving those works? Because that's what patents effectively do to copyright licences, and given the presence of patent-related clauses in other licences, it isn't just the FSF who has noticed.

There's also a train of thought that GPLv2 actually compels patent-holders to license their patents to recipients, too. So when companies like Nokia who offered patent-related promises around Linux did so, it probably wasn't corporate generosity on display: the highly-specific version information accompanying such promises should have given the game away there.

Patents and the open-source community

smoogen — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 23:52:51 +0000

I was looking at them to be separate documents where you put code that followed the patent into the GPL universe versus tieing them together in one license. [It was more of a 'well if they are going to make it so I can't code certain things because its patented.. then maybe they shouldn't be able to code certain things without paying me the way I want.] However I was also much much younger and more naive about how patents, licensing and commercial companies worked.

Patents and the open-source community

jcm — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 20:02:10 +0000

Well, it did happen in the GPLv3. My own personal opinion is that the GPLv3 was incredibly damaging as a result. It didn't actually kill the patent system so much as force all of the large corporations (especially those new to FLOSS) dealing with Open Source to impose extremely draconian (yet understandable) measures to prevent the undermining of their patents. What should be happening is the reform of patent legislation on the books, not attempts to hack the system with licenses that simply serve to push good folks away. This is one of the reasons I killed my FSF membership a while back. They no longer represent the kinds of views I hold.

Patents and the open-source community

smoogen — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 23:46:42 +0000

Back in the early 90's when software patents were becoming big, and it looked like the courts would uphold them, I asked RMS why we didn't have a GNU Patent License that hacked Patents like they did Copyright. You could use the patent all you wanted but only if the code you implemented was under a GPL license. The argument that I got back was that they should just be abolished which was true but not likely.

The bigger problem with my idea was that patents are not 'freely' given like copyright. It takes a lot of work and money to get a patent filed so there needed to be a backing source that was willing to 'give' up money for something that it wasn't getting a monetary return on. That never appeared so a GNU Patent License was never going to be possible.