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Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.
Community leaders such as Richard Stallman, [1] Alan Cox, [2] Bruce Perens, [3] and Linus Torvalds; [4] [5] companies such as Red Hat [6] and MySQL; [7] and community groups such as FSFE [8] and IFSO [9] all believe that patents cause problems for free software.
Leading open-source figures and companies [10] have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them. Bill Gates has said "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today". [11]
Free software projects cannot agree to patent licences that include any kind of per-copy fee. No matter how low the fee is, there is no way for a free software distributor to know how many copies are being made. Also, adding any requirements to pay or to notify someone each time a copy is made would make the software no longer free software. [12]
A patent licence that is royalty-free, or provides a one-time worldwide payment is acceptable. Version 2 of the GNU General Public License does not allow software to be distributed if that software requires a patent licence that does not "permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you". [13]
The Version 2 of the GNU General Public License [14] of 1991 also says that patents convert free software to proprietary software:
"Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
In 2004, Open Source Risk Management commissioned a patent study, carried out by Dan Ravicher. For this study, Ravicher performed patent searches to estimate the patent-risk of the Linux kernel: [15]
In conclusion, he found that no court-validated software patent is infringed by the Linux kernel. However, Ravicher also found 283 issued but not yet court-validated software patents that, if upheld as valid by the courts, could potentially be used to support patent claims against Linux.
However, Mark Webbink, who was Red Hat's Deputy General Counsel, said that Ravicher did not deduce the kernel to infringe any of said patents. [16]
"Patent retaliation" clauses are included in several free software licenses. The goal of these clauses is to create a penalty so as to discourage the licensee (the user/recipient of the software) from suing the licensor (the provider/author of the software) for patent infringement by terminating the license upon the initiation of such a lawsuit.
Early drafts of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) contained several patent retaliation clauses that varied in scope, some of which were later removed due to concerns about their efficacy. [17] The final published version of GPLv3 contains a patent retaliation clause similar to those in the Apache License and Mozilla Public License, which terminates rights granted by the license in response to litigation alleging patent infringement in the software. [18]
In 2005, IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony founded the Open Invention Network (OIN). OIN is a company that acquires patents and offers them royalty free "to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux-related applications". [19]
Novell donated the valuable Commerce One web services patents to OIN. These potentially threaten anyone who uses web services. OIN's founders intend for these patents to encourage others to join, and to discourage legal threats against Linux and Linux-related applications. Along with several other projects, Mono is listed as a covered project.
Movements have formed to lobby against the existence and enforceability of software patents. The earliest was the League for Programming Freedom in the USA. Probably the most successful was the anti-software-patent campaign in Europe that resulted in the rejection by the European Parliament of the Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions which, the free software community argues, would have made software patents enforceable in the European Union. A fledgling movement also exists in South Africa. [20]
Some software companies who hold significant patent portfolios have made non-aggression pledges to the free software community. These have varied in scope and have received a variety of responses. IBM, [21] Sun, and Nokia [22] are three examples. These have been described by Richard Stallman as "significant", "not really anything", and "next to nothing", respectively. [23]
Microsoft has irrevocably pledged not to assert any claims against open source developers [24] which CEO Steve Ballmer called "an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies." [25] This pledge has been accepted with some skepticism. [26]
Microsoft has claimed that free software such as OpenOffice.org and the Linux kernel violate 235 Microsoft patents and said that it will seek licence fees, [27] but has so far failed to disclose which patents they may violate. However, the 2009 lawsuit against TomTom involved the use of Microsoft's patents for long filenames on FAT filesystems, the code for which was in the Linux kernel, not in any TomTom-developed software. [28] The Linux kernel developers subsequently worked around it. [29]
In 2011 a company called Bedrock Technologies LLC won a judgment of $5 million against Google for use of the Linux kernel, which the court found to violate US patent 5,893,120 (which was filed in 1997 and issued in 1999, and covers techniques for software caches likely used in every modern operating system). Bedrock went on to sue Yahoo and lost; Yahoo's defense amounted to the use of a different version of Linux which did not execute the particular code that Bedrock had pointed out as infringing, [30] but the Yahoo case did not invalidate Bedrock's patent. [31] Details of exactly which code Bedrock said infringed the patent and how Yahoo managed to avoid executing that code are not publicly available.
In January 2008, Trend Micro accused Barracuda Networks of patent infringement for distribution of the ClamAV anti-virus software. [32] [33]
In November 2006, a highly controversial agreement was made between Novell and Microsoft that included patent licensing. [34] This led to much criticism of Novell by the free software community. [35]
In June 2007, Xandros announced a similar deal. [36] [37] [38]
On June 13, 2007, a deal was reached between Microsoft and Linspire. [39] In return, Linspire would change its default search engine from Google to Live search. [40]
Ubuntu founder and director Mark Shuttleworth has said that Ubuntu will not be making any such deal, [41] as have Red Hat. [42] These have been joined by a weaker statement from Mandriva [43] that "we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft".
In October 2007, IP Innovation LLC, a company specialized in patent-protection, filed a suit for patent infringement against Red Hat and Novell. [44] [45] [46] However, IP Innovation LLC is a subsidiary of a company classified by some as a patent troll, [47] and commentators suspect a strong connection between this company and Microsoft. [44] [45] In 2010, IP Innovation lost the suit. [48]
In December 2007, Microsoft granted the Samba project access to certain proprietary documents and must maintain a list of related patents for a one-time fee of 10,000 Euros. [49] Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24, 2004 Decision pertaining to antitrust violations.
Free software, libre software, libreware or rarely known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
Xandros, Inc. was a software company which sold Xandros Desktop, a Linux distribution. The name Xandros was derived from the X Window System and the Greek island of Andros. Xandros was founded in May 2001 by Linux Global Partners. The company was headquartered in New York City with its development office in Ottawa, Canada.
SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement. In 2021, the case finally ended in a settlement.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software and since 2005, also the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.
In a series of legal disputes between SCO Group and Linux vendors and users, SCO alleged that its license agreements with IBM meant that source code IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell, and Red Hat filed claims against SCO.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term for free software and open-source software. FOSS is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and the source code is hidden from the users.
Freespire is a community-driven Linux distribution currently owned by PC/Open Systems LLC. It is derived from Linspire and is composed mostly of free, open source software, while providing users the choice of including proprietary software including multimedia codecs, device drivers and application software.
Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.
Open Invention Network (OIN) is an intellectual property rights company based in Durham, United States. It operates as an entity specialising in the acquisition of patents, subsequently granting royalty-free licenses to its community members. These members are obligated not to assert their own patents against Linux and its associated systems and applications as per the terms of the licensing agreements established by OIN.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License, but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants".
The history of free and open-source software begins at the advent of computer software in the early half of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code—the human-readable form of software—was generally distributed with the software, providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
Digital Cornerstone was a Linux and open source software company based in San Diego, California. It primarily targeted desktop computers with its flagship Linux distribution, Linspire. It was bought in 2008 by Xandros, Inc., a former competitor, and made a semi-independent subsidiary of the company.
The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The GPL was the first copyleft license for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, where it is also based.
Linspire is a commercial operating system based on Debian and Ubuntu and currently owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC. It had been owned by Linspire. Inc. from 2001 to 2008, and then by Xandros from 2008 to 2017.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)We have declined to discuss any agreement with Microsoft under the threat of unspecified patent infringements.
LLC is a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation... This past July Acacia hired Jonathan Taub away from his job as Director, Strategic Alliances for the Mobile and Embedded Devices (MED) division at Microsoft and then, just last week, it hired Brad Brunell away from his job at Microsoft where, among other jobs, he served as General Manager, Intellectual Property Licensing.
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