Debian Announces Position on Software Patents | Hacker News Reader

Debian Announces Position on Software Patents

debian.org

88 pointssciurus35 comments

Considering the proliferation of software patents, with very general claims like the XOR patent, all non-trivial software "infringes" anyway, no matter how many fees are paid.

Politically it matters in that it means software patent laws are broken and punish the creators of software.

But I don't think Debian should regard some software patents more highly than others and refuse to distribute some software because of those. That gives third parties leverage to make the distribution much less useful (for example by selectively crippling multimedia on desktops), without breaking the illusion that the law is really applied.

If these parties tried to mount actual legal challenges, they would have to spend money, raise awareness of the law, publicly behave in an anti-competitive manner, and risk losing some of their patents for, at most, an interdiction of some packages in some jurisdiction. I don't see why Debian should give this away.

This comment - and several others - seem to only be seeing half the picture in this new policy. Yes, it says they won't distribute software the know to infringe.

But the other aspects of the policy set up working practices and operating procedures to minimize visible, organizational knowledge of patents. It seems to me that they're actively trying to avoid knowing about patents so that they don't have to invoke the no-distribute clause and, if they do get sued, can hopefully keep away willful infringement claims. I think that's in general been their goal, but the new policy provides a clear and consistent mechanism for handling the issue.

Wouldn't a publicly stated policy of willful ignorance negate any defense of willful infringement?

If I make a point of not looking at speed limits signs, and pt a bumper sticker on my car saying "I don't read speed limits", would it be reasonable to expect the nice police officer to not write me a ticket?

I have worked for and with a lot of major technology corporations, and the official policy for employees has always been "willful ignorance": do not read patents, do not discuss patents, except with an attorney. So a lot of highly-paid patent attorneys must feel this is a valid approach.

That is one reason it's obvious the patent system is off the rails -- since part of the idea of patents is to encourage people to publish their inventions, presumably to be read by others.

Consider if knowingly breaking the speed limit resulted in a fine 3 times larger than if you unknowingly broke the speed limit. I agree there are criticisms from a wider perspective and it also negates one of the original intent of patents to share previously "secret" knowledge.

Would it be possible to design an open source license that disallows the use of the software by corporations holding software patents..?

Or something that would make holding software patents crippling?

The current GPL (GPLv3) does implement this goal, but in a different way. It has a very clever paragraph that basically says: If you distribute the software you give basically every user a free licence of your patent.

More information: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#stronger-...

It's a shame that the GPLv3 isn't more commonly used. The GPLv2 has some language & sections that would mean you cannot sue people with patent claims, however, due to how patents and copyright differ, all these things kick in only if you write the code and have the patent, i.e. if Microsoft were to release, under GPLv3, code that they patented, it would be OK. If I write code that implements the H264/mp4 codec, then we can all still be sued for patent infringment.

This is exactly the reason why many people don't use the GPLv3. If Apple distributed a slightly modified GCC, they would be also given away every patent they have that might be used anywhere in GCC. That is unacceptable, as doing a full search over the whole source code for patent usage isn't reasonable.

I upvoted you, but I disagree with your conclusion. Some people (e.g. myself) think that it would be great if Apple had to go open source.

Oh, I would love it if Apple went open source.

However, if I was running Apple, I would consider applying applying a fairly substantial amount of money into avoiding GPL3. This appears to be exactly what Apple are doing (I don't think their support of clang after gcc went GPL3 is a coincidence, maybe I'm wrong).

See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 "Apple’s great GPL purge"

Apple replaces GCC with LLVM and Clang. Both are open source.

and both of which are BSD licensed, which Apple has shown to prefer.

For those who don't want a copyleft license, Apache 2 includes a patent grant too:

    3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this
    License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide,
    non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this 
    section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, 
    and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those
    patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed 
    by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) 
    with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute 
    patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim 
    in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within 
    the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any 
    patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall 
    terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

A license like that would violate the Debian free software guidelines.

http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines

This is the first article of the policy:

> Debian will not knowingly distribute software encumbered by patents; Debian contributors should not package or distribute software they know to infringe a patent.

That seems a bit too vague for me. Would free software like Mono, VLC or ffmpeg fall under this category? Many people would say that they are patent encumbered, (and of course, many would say the opposite).

Have you ever used Debian? It already doesn't distribute many codecs for precisely this reason.

Currently, Debian does distribute Mono, VLC and ffmpeg, I'm not aware of the codecs you speak of.

(Oh, and I do use Debian, five days a week, but I don't see how that's relevant to my question.)

They didn't - last I knew - distribute LAME or other MP3 encoders. I think the patent enforcement situation has changed since that call was originally made, but earlier (late 90's, early 2000's), the patent owners were enforcing patents for encoders but not decoders.

It is a version of Firefox with the branding removed as that portion has a copyright by Mozilla. This project started in 2004-2005.

I actually thought the policy in the original post has always been Debian's policy.

Mozilla has trademark rights over the Firefox name and logo, and they license the logo's image file under a proprietary copyright license. It has nothing to do with patents, so the new policy does not affect that issue at all.

Isn't this one reason for the existence of http://debian-multimedia.org ?

Have you used it recently?

You can taint your install with pretty much anything.

I have access to more firmwares blobs than with Ubuntu.

What's "known" - are they going to keep track of it somehow?

There's only one correct position: Software patents shouldn't exist.

This is a good step. One thing people don't remember is the mid-2000s Linux Foundation Patent Commons initiative. At one time Oracle was a member (http://lwn.net/Articles/227902/).

Time to move Mono to the non-free repo where it belongs.

Mono is Free Software [1]. You might be confusing licensing with potential patent encumbrance, perhaps on purpose since one of your activities here seems to involve spreading disinformation about that project [2]. Which perhaps is not surprising considering you also seem to be one of the regulars at techrights. [3]

[1] http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347529

[3] http://goo.gl/8Xb4R

I interpret Debian's statement as "we will reject all forms of Patent Aggression", and Microsoft, through the Mono project, has been aggressive about patents.

> Microsoft, through the Mono project, has been aggressive about patents.

Can you please point out something that backs this statement? Not to dismiss the fact that Microsoft uses patents offensively, because they do, but specifically related to, or in the context of, the Mono project.

This is about as surprising as discovering that Ursidae defecate in the forest.

Agreed: as soon as I knew that they had a (new?!) position on software patents, I knew what it would be. Still, it's worth keeping the issue front and center.

I guess presidents day is a slow news day on hn:)

True, but the linked FAQ is very informative for anyone involved in open source software development, or software development in general:

http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

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