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:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Is a "pledge" legally binding?
Re:After Reader Debacle, Let's retry Don't Be Evil (Score:0, Interesting)
It's clear what's going on here is that Google is once again trying to return to it's "Don't be Evil" roots -- even though its behavior is painting it less and less of the champion of the free internet, and more just-another-profit-centered-corporation. When you sue an open source software producer, you usually don't get much money or anything in return, so it's not a big deal monetarily. The gesture however gives them some PR points they've desperately been seeking lately, especially amongst the tech community they've alienated by cancelling Reader. Likely though, it's too little, too late.
They are trying to suckers us into believing that they are going back to their "Don't be Evil" roots, which in truth has always been a publicity stunt. I'd like to see of this resolve to not use these patents to extort FOSS projects would survive contatct with a situation where their search engine monopoly has lost 45% of it's market share to a FOSS search engine that uses algorithms potentially covered by Google patents. In fact I'd be interested to see if patents relating to their search engines will ever be covered by this pledge.
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:2, Interesting)
In general, no, with patents specifically, yes.
Google's a "me, too!" (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well, duh. (Score:4, Interesting)
because people love to make it sound like GPL is terrible when it's not. Specifically people who are: pro apple, pro microsoft, or anti google. The rest of the world understands GPL and why it's great and takes advantage of it every day.
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually very clever. It means less open source software is GPLed, because the GPLv3 means that patent rights have to be dismissed. Thus more will be BSDed/MITed. Then, because it's BSDed/MITed, more big companies will actually use the software (because most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague). Then those big companies will release a closed version, and have to pay google.
Cunning indeed.
Re:it is in enforceable in at least US, UK, Austra (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really a matter of reputation. Google's business model turned out to be largely relying on their being Open Source friendly. With this pledge they reinforce this image. If they betray this image, the backdraft could be painful. Probably not fatal, but painful.
I'm really as defiant as the next guy about Google's behaviour, and I don't take at face value their motto of not doing evil, but on the matters of IP they seem to have been consistently opposed to maximalism, and have supported many open stuff. I watch them closely on data privacy matters, but in most other issues I find their position decent - so far.
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Also if you read it it only cover specific Google patents. So they can identify the business areas where this strategy is a net win and put those patents into the pledge. In other areas where it might be a net loss they don't.
In fact I think this whole pledge is about a specific Google project, but they haven't told us what that is.