4 ms·

Slight bias? > There is little indication that the rest of the company shares the Azure product group’s commitment to open source, especially not the patent li

by baldfat 10y ago

Slight bias? > There is little indication that the rest of the company shares the Azure product group’s commitment to open source, especially not the patent licensing group. I think the Open Sourcing of .net, PowerShell, VS Code and Ubuntu Bash in Windows 10 would also be obvious inclusions? THIS EXIST https://github.com/Microsoft https://github.com/Microsoft The issue here is Software Patents exist.

air 10y ago
> The issue here is Software Patents exist. It's possible to not be asshole with software patents. See Facebook and Google.
- gcp 10y ago
  Does Facebook have any binding commitment to not be an asshole with patents? (The patent license on things like React.js surely isn't)
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents. They've signed their patent pledge for a very limited scope of patents which looks good for PR purposes. Bear in mind, patent extortion tends to look good as a business model once your main revenue source is starting to wane. So while Google may be behaving with patents today, they've been amassing a pretty large library... and the advertising market is expected to start going downhill fast. Google has pledged not to abuse 245 patents: http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/ http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/ It's hard to get an accurate number on how many patents Google owns (Google's search results are unhelpful, I'm sure they know, but they aren't sharing), but considering they picked up 17,000 from the Motorola acquisition alone, we can assume safely that Google is reserving the right to be a patent troll.
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Google+Inc https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Google+Inc. puts them at 30,440 but I'm not sure that'll include Motorola ones or any acquired ones.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    "Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents.' Google has released 4000+ open source projects[1] under the apache license, which has a pretty broad patent grant, something you seem to be completely ignoring. This includes things like tensorflow, the maps geometry library, etc. I'm not sure what you consider "the good patents", but for most developers, it's the stuff we open source. [1] This is just the 30 day active number, the total number over the 11 years i've been at Google is closer to 12k, last i looked.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Re: Apache license. But that only really covers the patent as far as the specific open source work in question. Implementing the content of said patent independently would leave you open to being sued by Google, right? The question is, if Google has this open patent pledge, right, why are only 245 patents in it of the tens of thousands they have? Dare I suggest you ask Larry Page if you ever get the chance, why is Google so afraid to put it's money where it's PR spin is? If Google TRULY believes what it says, it'd act on it.
      - DannyBee 10y ago
        "Re: Apache license. But that only really covers the patent as far as the specific open source work in question. Implementing the content of said patent independently would leave you open to being sued by Google, right?" Maybe? But i'm not sure what the point is? This is true of literally every patent granting open source license I mean, i'll be honest, this basically sounds like whining to me. Nothing is ever enough. As for the open patent pledge, it's pretty simple: Nobody has ever cared enough to desire more patents there. Seriously. 99% of people don't go around trying to reimplement the stuff we do, they use the implementations we give them. Where they haven't, and it's serious, Google has tried to pledge patents. This has happened pretty much never. In fact, i can't think of the last time someone asked. Optimizing heavily for the 1% case makes no sense. Past that, OPN says "The OPN Pledge is designed to supplement existing OSS licensing alternatives ..." (IE it's designed to supplement our permissive licensing). In any case, it sounds like you have an axe to grind here, so i'm pretty much out, since i'm sure no answer i give you will ever satisfy you.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Why are you addressing a hypothetical theory that has absolutely no basis? Why not address a real issue like Microsoft extorting Billions from Android OEM's for their obsolete, junk filled prior art ridden patents?
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Software patents are unnecessary and they hurt innovation. New Zealand has banned all software patents.
  - bungle 10y ago
    The most of the world doesn't have them in a first place, so no need to ban anything. It is just that USA is so horribly protective nation, that rest of us have to deal with this as well. E.g. want to sell your NZ stuff in states? Well, better to pay some protection money then.
  - keithnz 10y ago
    sort of... http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-zealand-patent-office-issues-first-software-patent-under-new-law/ http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-z...
jononor 10y ago
All those are developer tools, that you can use for developing for Azure. Yes even Ubuntu, as Azure hosts Ubuntu as well.
DannyBee 10y ago
"The issue here is Software Patents exist." And I can tell you, as a person who was out there fighting this for one of these companies, that it was very lonely, and still is. I can tell you that when i've been out there fighting the good fight, people like MS have been actively opposed to changing the status quo (as has pretty much every other software industry company except possibly newegg :P) They don't always come out and say it publicly, but they do so privately for sure. Why do you believe nothing has changed? Do you really think if companies representing many hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue went to congress and said "fix this" they wouldn't? Certainly big pharma does everything they can to block it[1], but these industries are now worth about the same (~400 billion worldwide as of a few years ago). It's really because there is no unified front in the software industry, but there is in pharma, etc. This is one of the reasons i gave up and let it go further to crap - even if you were to publicly expose everyone's hypocrisy, it wouldn't change anything (the population they care about writ large just doesn't give a crap), and until these companies actually care about changing anything, nothing will happen. [1] They want zero change because it's safer. You could say "software patents are special and expire in 5 years", but then what's to say the the next step isn't "pharma patents are special"
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  Why not declare a new patent pledge [1] against hiring anyone who applied for a software patent after, say, July 1 2017? Plenty of time for notice, there are enough software developers who are both smart and care enough about this issue that it shouldn't cause your hiring pool to suddenly shrink, those who keep finding justifications to apply for software patents are going to start using such a pledge to justify not applying for them, and most of all, the resulting changes for Big Tech is an excellent win-win situation for everyone concerned. Because I am guessing whatever revenue they do end up losing will be more than made up with the goodwill (and thus developer mindshare) they will accrue once they get all their employees on board. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
  - tptacek 10y ago
    One good reason not to have this hiring rule is that many employees work under contracts that require them to cooperate with patent filings; I had one that required me to cooperate even after I left the company.

by baldfat 10y ago

air 10y ago

> The issue here is Software Patents exist. It's possible to not be asshole with software patents. See Facebook and Google.

gcp 10y ago
Does Facebook have any binding commitment to not be an asshole with patents? (The patent license on things like React.js surely isn't)
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents. They've signed their patent pledge for a very limited scope of patents which looks good for PR purposes. Bear in mind, patent extortion tends to look good as a business model once your main revenue source is starting to wane. So while Google may be behaving with patents today, they've been amassing a pretty large library... and the advertising market is expected to start going downhill fast. Google has pledged not to abuse 245 patents: http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/ http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/ It's hard to get an accurate number on how many patents Google owns (Google's search results are unhelpful, I'm sure they know, but they aren't sharing), but considering they picked up 17,000 from the Motorola acquisition alone, we can assume safely that Google is reserving the right to be a patent troll.
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Google+Inc https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Google+Inc. puts them at 30,440 but I'm not sure that'll include Motorola ones or any acquired ones.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents.' Google has released 4000+ open source projects[1] under the apache license, which has a pretty broad patent grant, something you seem to be completely ignoring. This includes things like tensorflow, the maps geometry library, etc. I'm not sure what you consider "the good patents", but for most developers, it's the stuff we open source. [1] This is just the 30 day active number, the total number over the 11 years i've been at Google is closer to 12k, last i looked.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Re: Apache license. But that only really covers the patent as far as the specific open source work in question. Implementing the content of said patent independently would leave you open to being sued by Google, right? The question is, if Google has this open patent pledge, right, why are only 245 patents in it of the tens of thousands they have? Dare I suggest you ask Larry Page if you ever get the chance, why is Google so afraid to put it's money where it's PR spin is? If Google TRULY believes what it says, it'd act on it.
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      "Re: Apache license. But that only really covers the patent as far as the specific open source work in question. Implementing the content of said patent independently would leave you open to being sued by Google, right?" Maybe? But i'm not sure what the point is? This is true of literally every patent granting open source license I mean, i'll be honest, this basically sounds like whining to me. Nothing is ever enough. As for the open patent pledge, it's pretty simple: Nobody has ever cared enough to desire more patents there. Seriously. 99% of people don't go around trying to reimplement the stuff we do, they use the implementations we give them. Where they haven't, and it's serious, Google has tried to pledge patents. This has happened pretty much never. In fact, i can't think of the last time someone asked. Optimizing heavily for the 1% case makes no sense. Past that, OPN says "The OPN Pledge is designed to supplement existing OSS licensing alternatives ..." (IE it's designed to supplement our permissive licensing). In any case, it sounds like you have an axe to grind here, so i'm pretty much out, since i'm sure no answer i give you will ever satisfy you.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Why are you addressing a hypothetical theory that has absolutely no basis? Why not address a real issue like Microsoft extorting Billions from Android OEM's for their obsolete, junk filled prior art ridden patents?
djsumdog 10y ago
Software patents are unnecessary and they hurt innovation. New Zealand has banned all software patents.
- bungle 10y ago
  The most of the world doesn't have them in a first place, so no need to ban anything. It is just that USA is so horribly protective nation, that rest of us have to deal with this as well. E.g. want to sell your NZ stuff in states? Well, better to pay some protection money then.
- keithnz 10y ago
  sort of... http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-zealand-patent-office-issues-first-software-patent-under-new-law/ http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-z...

jononor 10y ago

All those are developer tools, that you can use for developing for Azure. Yes even Ubuntu, as Azure hosts Ubuntu as well.

DannyBee 10y ago

"The issue here is Software Patents exist." And I can tell you, as a person who was out there fighting this for one of these companies, that it was very lonely, and still is. I can tell you that when i've been out there fighting the good fight, people like MS have been actively opposed to changing the status quo (as has pretty much every other software industry company except possibly newegg :P) They don't always come out and say it publicly, but they do so privately for sure. Why do you believe nothing has changed? Do you really think if companies representing many hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue went to congress and said "fix this" they wouldn't? Certainly big pharma does everything they can to block it[1], but these industries are now worth about the same (~400 billion worldwide as of a few years ago). It's really because there is no unified front in the software industry, but there is in pharma, etc. This is one of the reasons i gave up and let it go further to crap - even if you were to publicly expose everyone's hypocrisy, it wouldn't change anything (the population they care about writ large just doesn't give a crap), and until these companies actually care about changing anything, nothing will happen. [1] They want zero change because it's safer. You could say "software patents are special and expire in 5 years", but then what's to say the the next step isn't "pharma patents are special"

thr0waway1239 10y ago
Why not declare a new patent pledge [1] against hiring anyone who applied for a software patent after, say, July 1 2017? Plenty of time for notice, there are enough software developers who are both smart and care enough about this issue that it shouldn't cause your hiring pool to suddenly shrink, those who keep finding justifications to apply for software patents are going to start using such a pledge to justify not applying for them, and most of all, the resulting changes for Big Tech is an excellent win-win situation for everyone concerned. Because I am guessing whatever revenue they do end up losing will be more than made up with the goodwill (and thus developer mindshare) they will accrue once they get all their employees on board. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
- tptacek 10y ago
  One good reason not to have this hiring rule is that many employees work under contracts that require them to cooperate with patent filings; I had one that required me to cooperate even after I left the company.