Thread: Tech we can’t use or teach?
overengineer.dev
overengineer.dev
Anyway, one of the advantages a city gets is that it has a lot of locations to set up antennas. A public school, a library and so on, are all good locations that local citizens wouldn’t have access to. So the trick is to get your city to open up their LoRawan equivalent to the public. At least if you want to deploy things all over the city. Luckily mine does. It also gives you free access to power supplies if your project is benefiting the city (and open), and they are often interested in supporting you financially as well.
But as a whole, just don’t use threads.
Is this really true? I assume the licensing legalese means patents, and patents don't apply to private tinkering unless there's commerce involved.
More generally aside from hobby scope - The absurdity of the monopolies granted by the current patent regime are made obvious by this arrangement: Big companies that have patent portfolios to countersue with can use OpenThread freely, small businesses and startups can't.
(Obviously it still sucks and is a major chilling effect)
> What Would Prevent A Company From Shipping A Product Based On OpenThread Without Joining The Thread Group?
> If developers choose not to join Thread Group and ship products using Thread technology, they are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology, and may subject themselves to legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees.
It feels like even sharing my designs run a major risk of landing me in trouble. This sounds catastrophically hostile to open source in general.
If I ever want to make use of what I've built in any even remotely commercial setting, everything I've built feels liable to be infected & polluted with this copyright. I could rip out Threads & still not feel safe. I definitely can't sell a couple copies of this cool thing to other hobbyists on indiegogo.
The terms of use essentially outlaw community. Yes, maybe hobbyists can play with this, but they cannot form communities, they cannot share wisdom, they can't sell boards to each other, they can't even talk about the protocol or spec on detail.
So yeah, hobbyists arent expressly forbidden. But having any community of hobbyists seems fraught with difficulties. You can only hobbyist by yourself, discussing with no one.
Fuck Threads.
> Yes, maybe hobbyists can play with this, but they cannot form communities, they cannot share wisdom, they can't sell boards to each other, they can't even talk about the protocol or spec on detail.
But it just says you can't ship products and talking isn't shipping a product. The only part I see there is what if you sell things built on it.
Like sure it could be more open and sure having some small business exemption would be good but that's not the same as not being allowed to just make some stuff and talk about it.
> Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications.
They probably didn't expect interest from singular hobbyists, let alone hobbyists reading what they put out in the most uncharitable fashion. They have some clarifying to do if they decide that they care.
Practice here is as in "practice medicine", not "practice for tryouts".
"probably"?
It's a legal document that lists the things you may not do as vaguely and as broad as possible, and lists suing you as the first recourse in their remediation.
It's unwise to err on the side of "allowed" instead of erring on the side of "disallowed".
There's only a singular threat in the license is here: "Failure to maintain active Thread Group membership while shipping Thread technology may result in legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees."
It specifically mentions shipping.
It specifically mentions "specifications" too, and I did quote that bit in a previous comment that you replied to, so I know you read it.
How are we supposed to interpret "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."
You are specifically, in the license, forbidden from implementing, practicing or shipping the SPECIFICATIONS.
You literally cannot transfer any material or content that reveals the specifications.
Thread Group [...] grants you [...] license [...] to view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
[...] you shall not: 1) loan, rent, lease, sublicense, sell, or permit others to use the Specification; 2) modify, adapt, translate, or otherwise change the Specification in any manner or create any derivative work of the Specification;
[...] copy or reproduce the Specification except for backup or archival purposes in connection with your internal use; or 4) remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Specification.
So yeah, you can't create derivative works from these specifications. Is a blog post about it a derivative work? Who knows. Probably not. Probably what they meant is you just can't create your own Threads 2.0 specification or create unauthorized translation of it (which although restrictive is reasonable because they just don't trust you to not mess things up). They clearly just want to remain the single source of truth for Thread specification on the net, to avoid ecosystem fragmentation and they intend to sustain themselves from licensing fees from commercial device manufacturers.
Even with all their conditions normal rights to citation, critique, parody probably apply.
> are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology,
Under this, it sounds like one isn't even allowed to dabble with Thread without $7.5k/year membership. You aren't allowed to practice is the words they respond with, which seems far more constraining than shipping.
Re-quoting the licensing agreement requires to download the spec,
> view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
> are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology,
> Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications.
So yeah, actually it seems like even doing hobbyist things by yourself & telling no one is still far more than Thread group allows.
Fuck Thread! It's just so unbelievably shitty having the connected device technologies of our world be un-practiceable by mere mortals.
Anyone posting to a blog might also be regarded as shipping.
You're also focusing on one gotcha while ignoring the other terrifying clauses here. Are you still using the spec for internal purposes if you are talking about it?
IANAL but I strongly recommend any hobbyists or open source people steer the hell clear. These are terms for no engagement other than those willing to pay the anual fee.
Not saying that forgives this abysmal licensing regime of course.
Unless your blog is "I'm sharing holiday photos and nothing else", there's a lot of instances where it could be define as an outlet with commercial interests.
And, ultimately, I have no desire to spend any time and money on fighting even completely invalid claims. I'd rather spend my time watching cat videos on YouTube instead.
It only reserves right to charge you if you ship a product. And by product they most obviously mean a device and by ship they obviously mean sell (or gift, or possibly rent) to some customers.
All of this sounds like a thunderstorm in a glass of water by people who read too many software licenses.
> Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications.
And somehow think that the restrictions only apply when you "ship", but not when you "implement" or "practice".
"Failure to maintain active Thread Group membership while shipping Thread technology may result in legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees."
Which specifically mentions legal action in reaction to shipping only.
"Membership in Thread Group is necessary to ..." is just a statement of their wishes.
It's like "Sleeping is necessary for good health". It doesn't mean we'll sue you, if you don't sleep.
But also make sure others know. Actively warn and discourage other developers away from that technology. Make "Threads" regret their lack of openness.
Imagine how much less innovation there would be if it cost $7,500 a year to write anything that uses the Internet Protocol suite of standards.
Also, I don't think it helps to use this word "hobbyists".
The entire world runs on free open source software written by unpaid volunteers who are poorly supported, isolated, and exploited by mega tech corporations that are parasitical on their work.
"hobbyists" sounds demeaning, It makes it sound like the great under-structure of common coding is somehow less-than-serious, somehow outside some commercial ecosystem rather than the very soil and food that sustains it.
This (self) perception needs to change. Big Tech would die tomorrow without the "hobbyists" it depends on.
It's seems pretty clear-cut to me:
Q: What Would Prevent A Company From Shipping A Product Based On OpenThread Without Joining The Thread Group?
A: (roughly) You will be sued
Now, what does the word "product" in "Shipping a product based on OpenThread" mean?
A product is any (or some combination of) the following:
1. A devkit
2. A book
3. A blog post
4. Any hardware that uses Thread
So, yeah, you can't write a tutorial for using Thread, or make a doorbell for your mum's house, or tell your friend how to read the protocol, or start up a /r/thread community to help each other use it.
Looks pretty damned locked down to me, without at least the FRAND loopholes.
Why would a book, or tutorial, or blog post be excluded from the clause "Thread technology and Thread Group specifications"?
If you have a valid patent for e.g "A Device or Appparatus that does FooBar", you get certain exclusive rights for just that - that device is the "patented invention" where making/using/selling one is an infringement of the patent, but the description of that device (for example, the patent text itself) is not. A book about doing FooBar isn't a device that does FooBar, and neither is a tutorial or a blog post - the description of the patent is public, the knowledge in it is public, and you're legally allowed to redistribute that knowledge.
However, using the "patented invention" is an infringement[1], with no exceptions, so if the reader of that book or blog post would like to follow it and actually implement the patented method or follow the patented process in the privacy of their home, that would technically be a violation even if they are unlikely to be sued as the patent holder won't find out about it.
[1] 35 U.S.C. 271 Infringement of patent. (a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
Mum's doorbell might be gray area as you can easily say that it's still your doorbel, you just chose to install it wherever you chose to install it.
What does that have to do with anything? They don't say "we will sue you if you use our patents", they say "we will sue you if you use our specification".
Then it might work.
While you’re unlikely to be sued for something you do in your basement that has no broader commercial or cultural impact, it’s not impossible. There is no private use exemption to patents.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24148/can-i-build-so...
There is a narrowly-tailored "research exemption" to patents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption
So "private tinkering" where you implement something patented in order to perform research is permitted, but not for one's own benefit, even privately. For the example we're discussing, implementing Thread on some IoT device in order to benchmark it in various ways is in-bounds, but you can't use that device to your own benefit, even privately in your own home.
A corollary (and probably what the lawyers were getting at): not making yourself a target is more valuable than actually following the law. If you have money, keep it to yourself - some more unscrupulous actors will find some legal grey area you're operating in and sue you for it simply so they can force a settlement and get some of it. If you're doing something interesting (whether it's legal or not), keep it to yourself. If your interests are not aligned with someone else, gosh darnit, don't tell them or otherwise bring yourself to their attention. There is probably some lawsuit they can bring that would at least force an expensive court case and legal defense and make you want to settle to make it all go away.
And once you are a target anyway, follow the law scrupulously. This is why big corporations invest billions in legal & compliance departments.
(Also I'd think copyright in EU doesn't normally apply to implementing protocols as it's supposed to grant monopolies of creative expression? but IANAL)
To me, the issue isn't that someone wants people to pay to use their products, it's that they make you work to find out.
There really ought to be price transparency for everything, mandated by governments. I'm a dreamer, maaan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
>Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.[1] The Thread protocol specification is available at no cost; however, this requires agreement and continued adherence to an End-User License Agreement (EULA), which states that "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."[2]
Either one of these is expensive or one of these is cheap.
Most specialist stuff is like this. For example, Braille displays and equipment for blind people is outrageously expensive compared to most consumer electronics. But the price tag makes sense because of how few units they sell. So it takes a higher markup on each unit to make money. Solidworks is simpler and more expensive than Windows because it has orders of magnitude fewer users.
I'm unable to downvote this insane take so you get an angry reply instead.
This is the dumbest thing I've read today^1. Charging someone to use knowledge and understanding is insane. Here let me teach you how to do this, now if you ever do anything like this, fuck you pay me? What?!
Both charges are insane. The thread group could sell hardware implementations, or software libraries, that's an ethical way to fund Apple does sell access to it's platform. The extra fees for IP, what essentially is just understanding and know how is so stupid. And society would benefit greatly if everyone stopped pretending like thought crimes were convictable.
^1: which sounds meaningful until account that I've been up for 30m max
Edit: Kudos to the author for actually reaching out to them. I do wonder what he means by “ask for clarification”… This sounds like the kind of email I dread receiving… vague, open ended, gotta call the lawyer? Did he just ask if they could waive the fee?
> I contacted the Thread Group’s support email address on 2024-04-19 to request clarification on non-commercial Thread use.
The second one to their press team sounds super presumptuous, sorry for that, but I found that you kinda have to talk to press teams in that way if you want to get /any/ response at al.
Looking at https://www.threadgroup.org/thread-group, it seems like they already have some access for free ("Academic" and "Associate"). I'll have to review your blog post to see if you already reviewed those and what the specific issues were.
Edit: I see you did mention their "Implementor" membership level, but I'm not sure which of thier points you need to "implement their IP" that the no-cost memberships lack... "Access to IP rights", maybe?
> Q: Is membership in the Thread Group alone, at any membership level, sufficient to gain and receive royalty-free intellectual property rights (IPR) for Thread technology? A: No, membership at any level is not sufficient to gain and receive royalty-free intellectual property rights (IPR) for Thread technology.
and an Associate membership does not apply because I am not white-labeling or rebranding existing products.
The real problem here is people who invest money in this anyway.
I noped out of even considering it as a hobbyist as soon as i noticed that part.
Wow. So Google is in the Thread Group, and so is licensed to practice and ship the technology; which they do, in the form of OpenThread, under a permissive licence.
BUT anyone that uses OpenThread for anything at all is exposed to legal action unless they cough up the fees. Is that right?
So this is hard for me to understand: Google's OpenThread code is open to be inspected, and you can contribute to it, under a BSD-like licence; but Thread Group holds the IP, and reserves the right to sue. As always, the patents covering it are not listed, and some of them might be submarines. I don't see why it's called "Open" Thread, if you probably can't even use the library without a Thread Group licence.
All the combined wealth of every individual who has ever wanted to tinker with Thread is a fraction of Google's warchest.
Google is a founding member of the Thread Group. OpenThread exists publicly because it's the only widely available implementation that's shipped in a lot of places. Nordic's SDK, for example, uses OpenThread.
OpenThread is built by and for members of the Thread Group, and used by them. It's fairly clear that Google doesn't care much about anyone else.
Sounds like they are trying to have their cake and eat it? Release code on a copy left license to try and gain open source contributions, but also force people to pay if they want to use it by crippling it with patents and some weird licensing BS.
Except no one outside of large corporations already paying for it are going to ever contribute code... how could they, you can't contribute code in a vacuum.
It's not a copyleft licence, it's a modified BSD-style licence. Basically, you can do what you like with it, except (a) delete or replace the licence, and (b) trade on the names of Open Group or it's developers.
> crippling it with patents and some weird licensing BS.
Not to mention that part of the lock-in is that certified implementations MUST validate a certificate from a peer, which MUST have been issued by Thread Group, and they will only issue one to a licensee. That is, it literally won't work unless the implementor has a licence.
Releasing the license is commonly refereed to as "public domain", but it's not actually possible to relinquish the copyright in all territories, and therefore people generally prefer some kind of license.
Seriously though, I agree with the other poster who suggested just avoiding this as much as possible and hope it dies off. I definitely wouldn't encourage anyone to actually embrace or adopt this. :-(
Well, there’s no way to know until someone finds out if they have relevant patent covers.
We need Compaq to clean room copy the stuff and then take the hit if there truly are valid patents…
I won't make a bet on which one, because I don't want to nag, but we all know which one it will be.
So I'm not sure it matters much whether APIs are copyrightable when what Google did was ruled fair use. I'd prefer if the courts ruled APIs weren't copyrightable, but I think it was still a good result because doing what Google did probably covers about any use case anyway.
Then the Supreme Court ignored the copyrightability aspects & ruled for a Google on some fair use grounds.
I've skimmed the write up from the ever excellent always recommendable Mark Lemley, Interfaces and Interoperability After Google v. Oracle, and really hope I can go a bit deeper into the history & trial at some point. Section 2 The Long Saga of Google v. Oracle starts on page 27 of the inner pdf. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3898154
It's been incredibly disappointing watching courts like the Federal Circuit be so unable to handle even basic technical matters with even an iota of comprehension, having them bungle up things so badly in the face of so much easy to rely on precedent. Being sweet talked by Oracle's lawyers into believing a header file is anything greater than interface definiton is either incompetence, or some really vicious pro-business hellworld shit.
Typically patents "essential" for a standard are licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms. But you do still have to go and pay for the license (sometimes from all the individual companies that have patents, sometimes from a consortium that represents the entire patent pool for a standard).
(I've also been playing around with Thread this week, as it happens. Surprised how easy it was to flash the example project to an ESP32 and start pinging it from my laptop)
This makes me think that should Thread gain some traction among users, cheap clones implementing it under a similar name, yet without any licensing, would appear shortly on sale at the usual vendors.
LoRa is perfect for sensor networks that it was designed for, and good for mesh messaging as long as it stays niche.
Well, in this situation, and assuming Thread is technically worthwhile - perhaps people would start using it "illegally" (with or without quotes). If such use is wide enough, it might get effectively legalized, albeit gradually.
So tactically I think this actually plays against making it effectively legalized.
But - it's not impossible that what you're describing is what will end up happening. Question is - is there a worthwhile alternative?
I feel like their conditions are refering to manufacturing and delivering products that use Thread tecg to some third party (selling, gifting, possibly renting). Not about teaching, publishing or experimenting. As long as you don't transfer what you've built to another person you should be fine.
Am I misreading?
> Thread Group, Inc. […] hereby grants you a […] license […] to view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
uses the term "internal purposes" which doesn't seem to include writing a blog post for the external world to see.
What if we (the community) were to establish an entity that would pay the licensing for whatever required level and pitch in a small amount each towards the fees and we could all then be legal?
Essentially the new entity would be licensed and we all would be licensed unter the entity. Fractionating the larger dollar figure across us all.
Many commercial software patent licensing agreements for at least the last twenty years (the timeframe I've noticed contracts tend to have realized open source and networks are a thing) have clauses that specifically prevent or limit this, called "preemptive sublicensing restrictions":
https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/10/sublicensing-considera...
In the "fine print" of the Thread agreements including IP agreement -- reading not very closely and while commenting here -- they ensure this a little obliquely:
https://www.threadgroup.org/Becomemember
In the various agreements they've defined Implementor as what you need to, well, implement it, and it does allow sublicensing to affiliates, but separates out Participants and Associates from Affiliates, and puts a high bar on what can be an Affiliate.
Based on the provided definition of "Affiliate" in the context of the Thread Group, Inc. Implementer Participation Agreement, an Implementer cannot simply sign agreements with third parties to make them "Affiliates" in order to sublicense the Implementer's license. According to the definition, an "Affiliate" must be a corporation, company, or other entity that either owns or controls the Implementer, is owned or controlled by the Implementer, or is under common control with the Implementer, with a significant threshold of more than fifty percent ownership or control.
This means that the relationship defining an entity as an Affiliate is based on substantial ownership or control rather than merely contractual agreements. An Implementer would need to have a majority ownership or control over another entity for that entity to qualify as an Affiliate and thereby enjoy the rights and privileges, including any sublicensing rights, granted under the Implementer's license. This ensures that Affiliates are closely tied to the primary Participant, maintaining a direct and substantial connection rather than a loose contractual relationship.
// IANAL, YMMV, ask your attorney, standard disclaimers apply
Especially when our use cases are something like "make a home-made coffee bean counter last 90 days on battery power instead of 55".
WFM!
We're gonna see a lot more Système D applied in the future...
This stuff is so horrific.
A large fraction, if not most, of potential users of software in the world can simply not afford paying any non-trivial amounts of money (by US/European figuring) for software of any kind; they simply don't have such money to spare. Look at median incomes in different countries:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
My point is that "free software supported by data harvesting and advertising" isn't more profitable in poor countries than software you buy off the shelf. Advertising revenue scales down just as much as disposable income for apps.
If advertising were lucrative, it probably wouldn’t be that way.
Which must be the holy grail of enshittification, I mean it is one thing to make your own product/service worse. But to make everyones products worse? Jackpot!
Might be of interest if Thread is of interest to you.
The tech purgatory we live in today between utopia and dystopia is mostly walled gardens and surveillance capitalism. We pay a fortune for 5G and streaming services that technically have no reason to exist. It would be borderline trivial to develop real p2p networking for smartphones that self-organizes with others near them to share some fraction of their bandwidth and create a darknet. Like BitTorrent, performance would increase with the number of peers, so it would run faster at a festival for example, not slower. Which means that a gigabit radio would fully saturate and we'd be enjoying internet speeds perhaps 10-1000 times faster than we have now, even millions of times faster when the protocol runs on wired networks. Maybe something like Thread would facilitate the creation of a p2p network running on and alongside existing infrastructure.
I believe that this free p2p network should have been developed around 2007 when the iPhone and Facebook exploded, but greed took us into this alternate timeline where expenses rise faster than wages so we never have the time, money or resources to escape the rat race long enough to get the real work done that gets us closer to a Star Trek UBI economy and self-actualization. Meanwhile there are countless Mark Zuckerbergs, 1000 billionaires and millions of tech influencers who have won the internet lottery but don't pursue the goals that I'm talking about here. They just seem to build out ever more infrastructure to expand their wealth, creating a black hole that shrinks the wealth of the working class. I can only think of a handful of benefactors like MacKenzie Scott who might do it in reverse and seek out eager minds to offer them what they need to work at the pace they're capable of outside the status quo.
Which brings me to my point: the legalese obfuscating the Thread protocol isn't to protect their working group, but to prevent the disruption of the status quo in order to protect the fortunes of the biggest tech companies.
The thing is, we're crossing thresholds now where I don't think a lot of people under 50 expect the future to get better. They're waiting to have children because they don't have enough money. Children are dying in proxy wars and we can't even call out the political party responsible because the other one is scarier. We're facing enormous geopolitical threats like the rise of authoritarianism and we can't even call it out because we depend on products made by child labor in those same countries, created using minerals and fossil fuels which only exist there. I mean this is like, really serious stuff. If we want to actually invent the real innovation that heals the world and improves the quality of life for everyone, it starts with the most fundamental disruptive tech like this.