European Parliament To Exclude Free Software With FRAND 219
First time submitter jan.van.gent writes "The European Parliament is on the verge of adopting a directive reforming standards, reform which would introduce FRAND patent licensing terms, an undefined term which has been seen as a direct attack on the fundamental principles of Free and Open Source software. The Business Software Alliance has been very active trying to get FRAND terms into the directive."
Trying to figure out who the good guys are (Score:5, Interesting)
This is confusing. It seems to go like this:
General consensus: Some "standards" are being derailed by patent holders who make unreasonable demands.
Euros: We'll pass legislation that the demands have to be reasonable.
FSF: No! Because even so-called reasonable demands exclude FOSS, hence, they aren't really "reasonable".
Euros: But half a loaf of bread...
FSF: No! Give us the whole damn loaf, or nothing!
Personally I'd be happy to get half a loaf, and then allow for others to keep fighting for the other half.
One solution... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugly (Score:5, Interesting)
"supported by industry associations such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and members including Apple, Microsoft and SAP"
The evil trio of IT and it's attack dog. But hey, they just play the game of monopoly as far as the law allows. The really ugly part are the politicians who accept the bribes - sorry, I mean, work with lobbyists - and decide regulations benefitting the 1% only.
Re:What is so unfair about "fair?" (Score:5, Interesting)
There is nothing in FRAND, that I can see, that prohibits open source software or other open IP
There most certainly is; from the GPL:
You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License
if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.
How can I have the freedom to redistribute my software at no cost (which is one of the freedoms you have with free software) if I have to pay royalties to some standards body in order to do so, and force anyone who helps in that redistribution (i.e. mirrors, participants in a P2P networks, etc.) to do so?
Re:What is so unfair about "fair?" (Score:4, Interesting)
Standards can be legislated as compulsory. To require the use of patent items and hence compulsory payments, is nothing more than a government enforced monopoly with the sole intent of driving out all other businesses covered by that standard. None of them can sell that service, only one of them can, all the others are force to buy it and in the case of FOSS then have to give it away ie a direct corrupt tactic to drive FOSS out of business.
Want it in a standard, then give it away to start with or piss off with your corrupt intent.
Re:What is so unfair about "fair?" (Score:2, Interesting)
There is nothing in FRAND, that I can see, that prohibits open source software or other open IP
There most certainly is; from the GPL:
If there is a problem here, it is with the GPL, not with FRAND. As far as I can tell, BSD licensed software should be just fine. The GPL is not a free license, it is a very restrictive license.
But I'm not sure there is even a problem. The quote from the FRAND requirement posted above makes reference to patents, not to copyright: "FRAND is an approach used for decades by Standards committees that require any participant and any IP involved with a proposed Standard to offer open and uniform patent licensing to everyone (on the planet)." [emphasis mine]. GPL is a copyright license, not a patent license. Copyright law and patent law are two entirely different things, so I'm not sure there is any conflict here at all.
Unlikely to prevail (Score:5, Interesting)
This is unlikely to hold up long term even if it gets through parliament, as a number of European governments and cities have already adopted open source software in recent years.
This is another sad attempt to get proprietary software back into where it has been kicked out.
Re:Trying to figure out who the good guys are (Score:5, Interesting)
Software is special because it's purely mathematical, but we should try to eventually rid ourselves of copyright and patents altogether as well. It will not be worse because patents, especially software patents, do not result in a net social benefit, so the elimination of them would result in no longer having a hindrance.
The various patent holders only invented the invention once, so just getting paid once is fine as well. However, in this scenario, I'm saying that this is one option available. Google might find it better to pay a smaller royalty over time than a one time lump sum.
Then practically all people that write software are 'causing issues', because it's quite difficult to write non-trivial software that doesn't infringe on a patent. We're just fortunate in that most of the time, the patent holder is unaware of this fact.
If by works just fine, you mean helps to uphold rent seeking behavior, then sure. It's quite annoying that the standard often used for 'works just fine' is 'hasn't completely halted progress.'
Re:Trying to figure out who the good guys are (Score:4, Interesting)
If each cell phone manufacturer and network only used standards which were not patent encumbered, we'd have a much less robust wireless market.
More likely we would just have fewer vague, obvious, overbroad patents. The main impetus behind such patents is that if you can get them included as a necessary part of a standard, you can then run around collecting tolls from everyone in the industry. If no standards are accepted with necessary patents that are not freely licensed to anyone implementing the standard, the coerced market for those patents disappears, and either nobody bothers to file the bad patents in the first place, or the people who do then realize it is better to freely license them to anyone implementing the standard because in no event will they be getting any money from those implementing the standard, and by that point better to freely license it and improve the standard.
Re:Trying to figure out who the good guys are (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you really need to read up on what free software is. Paying for a patent license is completely incompatible with making your software free, because the freedom (the patent license) cannot be passed on. That's why the GPL2 is incompatible with it and why the GPL3 even aggressively retaliates against it.
That's also why Mozilla, even though they can easily afford to pay the H264 license for all Firefox users, has taken an "over my dead body" stance on it. If they include H264, it is no longer free software, and things like Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Ten-Four etc must cease to exist or are forced to be half-assed versions.
You can contrast this with Chrome, where Google doesn't give a shit that the open source version (Chromium) is crippled compared to the closed source one. But even they have stated that they'd like to get rid of the split. But they can't. Why?
Because patents.