Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Re:Ah but can you not also make bridges out of sto (Score:3, Informative)
From the summary:
The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party.
Re:A Bit Weird? (Score:1, Informative)
The more interesting bit in my mind is the fact that it does not apply to closed-source software that links against open-source software unless that closed-source software qualifies as "internal use only". As far as I'm concerned, if the licensing terms of the open source software allows you to link against it in a closed-source app, you should be able to do so without worrying about whether there might be any patents embodied in that open-source software.
Absent that assurance, no piece of open source software under any license other than the GPL (and other no-closed-source-linking) licenses can safely take advantage of any of these patents without creating patent risk for downstream users. Ethically, that makes this pledge worthless for anything other than GPLed software.
Try again, Google.
Re:Google's a "me, too!" (Score:5, Informative)
Note that IBM did the same thing with about 1000 of its patents, more than 10 years ago. And shortly
thereafter, followed up with another 1000 or so.
As stated in Google's blog link above.
Re:Darwin and Motorola (Score:5, Informative)
KHTML is what WebKit is based on.
It was not developed by Apple.
They did make major improvements, but they did base their work on KHTML which is LGPL.
Re:Darwin and Motorola (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, they DEFINITELY don't want you to be aware of free software, which is why the horribly obfuscated URL apple.com/opensource lists several hundred projects they are using, as well as links (and fully browsable source!) to anything they have modified. In fact, it's probably the simplest, most well-organized, and most public list of open source projects of any large company I have seen.
http://www.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]