Red Hat Pledges Patent Protection For 99 Percent of FOSS-ware (theregister.co.uk) 65
Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open-source software. From a report: The company has made more or less the same offer since 2002, when it first made a "Patent Promise" in order to "discourage patent aggression in free and open source software." Back then the company didn't own many patents and claimed its non-enforcement promise covered 35 per cent of open-source software. The Promise was revised in order to reflect the company's growing patent trove and to spruce up the language it uses to make it more relevant. The revised promise "applies to all software meeting the free software or open source definitions of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI)." [...] It's not a blank cheque. Hardware isn't covered and Red Hat is at pains to point out that "Our Promise is not an assurance that Red Hat's patents are enforceable or that practicing Red Hat's patented inventions does not infringe others' patents or other intellectual property." But the company says 99 percent of FOSS software should be covered by the Promise.
Re:I like Redhat (Score:4, Insightful)
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... and the way it was forced ...
Citation needed.
Software you quote is not forced on anyone. Distros generally started using software like pulseaudio because it is better - meaning that it solves a problem that was not solved before.
For example, I use Bluetooth headphones on Linux and because of pulseaudio, said headphones work. Bluetooth audio does not work with alsa so without pulseaudio, the same headphones would not work. This is why distros started adopting pulseaudio.
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Well, sorry to rain on your parade, but you'll have exactly the same software in FreeBSD, unless you're using only the base OS. And if you're not, plenty of non-systemd Linux distros, and quite more stable and secure that FreeBSD.
SystemD might affect FreeBSD as well (Score:2)
If Linux applications are, eventually, made to only run on systemd; then those applications might not work with FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer.
Or that is how I understand it.
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Systemd (Score:4, Informative)
The problem was that systemd was railroaded so fast through most of the major distros -- almost as if it were an insideous update to a proprietary OS, with the questionable acceptance by the Debian technical committee being the worst outcome, as it affected so many derivative distros.
This is untrue. Yes, many distros decided to adopt it in a short timeframe, but Red Hat had been testing systemd for years before that, and it's not like this was the first time that someone has either tried to replace sysvinit or someone has tried to introduce process tracking to the kernel. The pain points were known for decades, and as someone who has written a (short) book on the shell, anyone who prefers Bash as a scripting language has brain damage.
Debian's technical committee was split between systemd and upstart, with OpenRC being a distant third, and only one person who favored sysvinit. Since it is hopefully not in dispute that upstart was the worse option there, we can consider the decision to have been the best outcome. Note also that this was merely a decision about the default init system: sysvinit is still supported. The reason why sysvinit was not popular, however, was that the init scripts are comparatively more difficult to maintain, and generally slower. If Devuan has decided to shoulder the maintenance burden, I'm sure I wish them the best of luck with that.
The anti-systemd crowd here are morons, severally and collectively. No, systemd is not perfect, but there's a reason why people have been trying to replace sysvinit for the past three decades. Even OpenRC is almost entirely written in C. Either learn why, or quit complaining.
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anyone who prefers Bash as a scripting language has brain damage.
Ehh.. that really depends...
If you replace 'have a config file' with 'just source a bash script', yeah, that's not so good and one could fairly argue that the majority of init scripts were effectively this.
If you have a bash script that is hundreds of lines longs with many functions and such, then I would agree there is brain damage.
But for quick and dirty script to run a few binaries, it's much simpler than other methods. One just needs to be mindful they don't stay with bash if whatever it is promotes be
Uses of Bash (Score:2)
This is sentiment that I would broadly agree with. I don't dispute the usefulness of Bash as a command language, but scripting is not where it excels. Arrays are painful, conditionals are an external command, and functions are limited to positional parameters. Even parsing command-line options is ugly. Where Bash shines is the ten-lines-or-less script, the glue code that marshals other commands, or transforms output into another input. It also is extremely well suited to processing structured or semi-struct
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Unfortunately for you, might turn out that the morons are actually systemd apologists. The trainwreck, insecure bug ridden mess that is systemd, has been documented here:
https://twitter.com/systemdsucks
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thats like the catholic church protecting pedophile priests or the anti-christ, or defending the spanish inquisition which nobody ever expected
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I agree. Red Hat is not entirely evil, but I also wouldn't call them particularly good.
They are pretty much just a company like most others.
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FFS. They did not PUSH anything into anything, other than maybe Fedora. All other distros use these programs by their own choice. Either they are too lazy to develop their own products, or they are too stupid. Or MAYBE the other distros see value in systemd, pulseaudio, gnome, networkmanager. Wow. That's a thought. You seem to think very highly of RedHat engineers, and very poorly of other distro engineers if you think anything was PUSHED on them.
Buy-out (Score:2)
But I worry when Oracle buys them someday...
Exactly. Wouldn't it have made more sense to file the patents as prior art? As it is now, those patents are like nuclear weapons: never to be used, but always ready to fall into the wrong hands.
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Wouldn't it have made more sense to file the patents as prior art?
No. A patent portfolio is a good defense against patent infringement lawsuits by other practicing entities. Not only can you counter-sue, but you can often preempt lawsuits with broad cross licensing agreements.
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Why would Oracle buy RedHat?
Oracle Linux 7 is already based on RHEL7. Both open source. One based on the other. What's to buy? Support contracts?
Re:I like Redhat (Score:5, Informative)
Why would Oracle buy RedHat?
Patents.
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Brand strength, and a big customer set to start auditing and suing, as is Oracle's way.
Give it away give it away give it away now (Score:4, Funny)
I like the Red Hat Chili Peppers.
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Unfortunately this is needed (Score:2)
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Until the patent laws are reformed (good luck with that), companies are forced to play the game and protect their investment, particularly since the advent of patent trolls, in order to avoid frivolous lawsuits.
Some companies participate in patent pools as a means of protection AND advancements.
Heck, I know patents are evil. But I have one to my name. We have incentives to apply for them if they are found to have value.
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I know patents are evil.
Patents aren't evil. The abuse of patent law, and the inappropriate granting of patents (for instance, software patents) are evil, but there's nothing wrong with the underlying principle of patents.
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No, the abuses make it worse but the underlying principles aren't good either. Penalizing someone for using their own property in a non-violent way, just because someone else did it first, is evil. Copyright is wrong too, for many of the same reasons and others besides, but at least there you can limit your expose to things others might claim copyright on—only copies are prohibited, and you can't copy what you've never seen. That doesn't work with patents; whoever comes up with the idea first gets a m
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Patent owners are given a temporary monopoly in exchange for society at large getting to use (and, more importantly, build on) the patented thing after the monopoly period ends.
That sounds like a fair exchange to me. It's certainly better than the situation that patents are intended to fix: everybody keeping their inventions a secret, preventing society as a whole from benefiting from them.
Now, I'm speaking of the principle behind patents. Patent law as it currently exists in the US is an abomination: thing
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. (Score:3)
The AC3 decoder in FFmpeg is GPL, I guess this falls in the 1%, because I know Dolby would sue are ass
How so? I thought Dolby Digital [wikipedia.org] was used in DVD since 1997 and in cinema since 1992, putting it over the 20-year limit on patents. Which subsisting patents cover the standardized form of Dolby Digital?
Only 99%? (Score:3)
Why only 99%? If the software is FOSS, then the protection should be 100%, no less.
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Because some software is under really strange inscrutable licenses that cannot be reliably determined to be free or open source. That doesn't guarantee that they aren't free or open source, it just means we can't be sure until courts get involved.
And since it is generally really obscure software, it is highly unlikely that the courts will get involved.
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
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Luckily copyright is only 14 years unless the author registers it for another 14, so we can probably get full access in little over a decade.
Oh wait, I'm in the wrong country and the wrong century.
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"FOSS-ware" Is redundant (Score:4, Informative)
"FOSS-ware" would mean "(Free/Open Source Software)-ware"
The accepted terms are "free software [wikipedia.org]," "free (as in speech) software," "software libre," and if you really insist, "F/OSS" or "FOSS" as expanded above. Also valid but with slightly different definitions: "GPL-compatible" (tighter definition), "open source" (looser definition, allows prohibiting modification or even sharing), and "copyleft" (looser still).
If I were to coin a new term for something meeting RMS's Free Software Definition [gnu.org], I'd consider "freedomware"
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Compare to copyleft (Score:3)
I see it as little different from the copyleft model used by the GNU project on which Fedora and RHEL are built: distribute your program as free software, and assert your copyright against those who refuse to pass on equivalent rights to the users.
Thats fine until they decide not to. (Score:1)
So, this understanding... if its not in a contract. Then its just a promise. I promise to not sue you for using my IP giving condition XYZ. Until one day I decide to sue you for using my IP given condition XYZ.
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Promissory estoppel. It isn't iron clad, but it's good enough for most.
A terrible idea (Score:2)
"Defensive patents" are a terrible idea that increases the risk of patent abuse in the future and perpetuates the broken nature of the patent system.
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Refusing to use defense patents does not cause patent law to change, it simply causes FOSS companies to die and be replaced in the market by companies making proprietary software that can afford to pay the trolls. You have to work in the universe you live in, not the perfect one.
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Refusing to use defense patents does not cause patent law to change
True, I didn't claim otherwise. But it does perpetuate patent abuse (since it's a kind of patent abuse in and of itself, in my opinion).
Aside from that, the danger of defensive patents is that those patents are very likely, sooner or later, to fall into the hands of patent trolls themselves. And the more of them you accumulate, the more likely this will happen.
This terrifies me (Score:2)
I hate the idea that a single corporation holds patents covering 99% of open source software. That's an extremely precarious position to be in. It means we not only have to trust the company to be well-behaved, but we have to trust that any future owners of the company or the patent hoard have to be well-behaved.
In other words, it adds quite a lot of uncertainty to working with open source software.
I Have a Question (Score:1)
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What do you mean by "free"? Do you mean "as in beer"? Because if so, being free is not part of the definition of being "open source".
But most of Red Hat's software is free (as in beer.) They make their money essentially by selling support and guarantees to businesses.
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