Wednesday July 06, 2005 Pigs Fly And You Can't Patent It (in Europe Anyway)
The European Parliament finally got to vote on the European Software Patent Directive today and somewhat to my surprise threw out the whole thing. Over the last few months I have made many trips to Brussels to speak with politicians and European Commission staff on this subject. In particular, Mark Webbink from Red Hat and I have teamed up to explain to as many people as possible why it would be a disaster for the Open Source software movement if there was a regime where any kind of compulsory licensing applied to software interoperability. Kudos to the whole team (which included two other companies too) including a number of folk who prefer not to be named, for the behind-the-scenes work.
"Royalty Free Licensing" (RF) may sound much better than the infamous "Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Terms" (RAND) but the new world of community-maintained software is one where there is often no legal entity that can engage in a once-for-all licensing act of any kind. In this world, any terms that require an action to gain a license have to be fulfilled by the end-user, placing a chill on the market and threatening privacy - imagine if every Firefox user had to register to gain their "royalty free" license to some technology included in Firefox! Open source communities can't engage in licensing, can't indemnify, can't pay royalties - so those and all actions like them are hostile to open source.
While we would both have rather seen new law that actually created certainty and protected open source software and its developers, you'll note from the press release (next: pigs fly) that we both feel the rejection of the Directive as it stood was probably the least bad outcome. It's not over, though. Having cast out the demon we need to make sure that seven more don't fill the void and leave us worse-off than we were.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 06 2005, 01:12:00 PM PDT )
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