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GPL 3: FSF should stand firm on patents no matter what HP and other large corporations say

I just saw this article on how Linus Torvalds on the one hand and Hewlett-Packard on the other hand reacted to the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) second draft of its GPL v3 license.

Just like Linus, I, too, have said all along that digital rights management (DRM) is not categorically illegitimate and thus must not be ostracized as a whole. While Linus still seems dissatisfied with the FSF’s proposed GPLv3 in this respect, the aforementioned article quotes Hewlett-Packard (HP) saying that based on a preliminary analysis, there’s been a lot of progress on that front.

But the article also reports that HP wants the FSF to soften its stance on patents. I can only hope that the FSF will continue to stand firm on this issue. It’s obvious that certain companies with huge patent portfolios have a certain agenda, but you can’t please everyone.

I actually think it’s good if companies like HP, and even more so IBM, are forced to come clean. So far there is a lot of ambiguity, or I should say self-contradiction, in the strategies of those organizations. They claim to support the idea of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) whenever it’s useful to them from a sales, marketing or public relations perspective, but it’s still infinitely more important to them to have tens of thousands of software patents. They support initiatives such as the OSDL Patent Commons and make useless patent pledges that don’t help open source in any way (in fact, those initiatives are even counterproductive).

The GPLv3, if the FSF stands firm on patents, could become a litmus test: those who are sincere and really want Free Software and a competitive software market will support it sooner or later, and those who have a hidden agenda won’t.

Considering that even the deputy general counsel of the world’s largest Linux distributor tried, together with IBM, to keep the EU software patent directive alive last year, the FOSS community needs a lot more clarity as to where certain key players truly stand. By key players I mean corporations as well as individuals. At some point it will also be interesting to see with whom Linus sides. Let’s not forget that he’s on the payroll of the OSDL, an organization that gets most of its funding from a few large corporations such as IBM and HP.

MySQL: Planet MySQL

Patent infringement suit filed against Red Hat

The Patently-O blog reported yesterday that a software company named FireStar has sued Red Hat over an alleged patent infringement. Patently-O also provides the complaint and the patent document, and quotes from Red Hat’s patent policy. The FireStar suit relates to a piece of software that Red Hat acquired as part of JBoss Inc.’s intellectual property.

It seems to me that the FireStar patent is quite broad, and if it is upheld, it will affect other companies as well. While I know that certain parts of the free and open source software (FOSS) community don’t like to hear this, I have repeatedly stated that FOSS projects and products are particularly threatened by software patents. In this specific case, however, the fact that an open source program is at the center of a patent infringement suit appears to be a coincidence.

Red Hat was one of the three companies who provided the initial funding for my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign. I will always be grateful for that, and naturally I can’t talk in public about confidential aspects of the working relationship I had with Red Hat at the time. Suffice it to say that the working relationship ended, and while the other two sponsors (1&1 Internet AG and MySQL AB) continued to support me on a couple of other occasions, things didn’t work out with Red Hat again.

I have since watched Red Hat’s role in the political debate on software patents. At first sight, Red Hat appears to continue to take an anti-software patent position. Also, Red Hat made an effort last year to convince some of the large FOSS-friendly IT companies such as Sun to dissociate themselves from some of the pro-software patent propaganda spread by certain lobbying entities.

However, a few months after the European Parliament’s historic vote against the software patent directive, an adviser to a key MEP (Member of the European Parliament) told a private FFII mailing list that Red Hat’s deputy general counsel Mark Webbink lobbied him on the day before the decisive vote and tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the rejection of the software patent directive by the parliament. Yes: A Red Hat executive lobbied for the EU software patent directive at the 11th hour (on July 5, 2005, to be precise), alongside such companies as IBM and against the position taken by the anti-software patent movement. That’s a fact. It doesn’t mean to say that Red Hat as a whole is in favor of software patents, but it says a lot about the person who did this.

Red Hat has meanwhile been at the forefront of all sorts of placebo initiatives designed to alleviate patent-related concerns of open source developers and users, such as the OSDL’s Patent Commons. Depending on how the FireStar suit evolves, Red Hat may have to answer the question whether it grossly overstated the benefit of those initiatives to open source developers and users. Apparently, the patent projects supported by Red Hat haven’t really discouraged FireStar from suing.

MySQL: Planet MySQL