Great move by Google. And a good bit of timing, considering the PR beating they've been taking the past couple of weeks. One wonders if that's simply chance, or if they pushed this out when they did because of all the other stuff.
I'm guessing it's the former, since it typically takes big companies a long time to pull something like this together and fully execute it.
In any case, it's a good step for Google to suggest that they DO still take openness seriously and are, more or less, still the "don't be evil" company we all came to know.
This is (hopefully) related to the VP8/MPEG-LA patent licensing issue from a few days back. Remember that part of that announcement was that Google would be "soon" releasing the set of terms under which the licensed patents would be used. If these are those terms (and they aren't yet -- only MapReduce patents are mentioned), then this is fantastic news.
With all due respect to Reader, IMHO this announcement, viewed in the context of the legal battle that rages over software patents these days, is in a wholly different league.
Yes, but it wasn't just about Google Reader. A number of things happened (or hit the news) in a short period of time, all of which damaged Google's standing as the "Don't Be Evil Company" and hurt their credibility with hackers and people who care about things like the Open Web and Open Standards.
I'm not necessarily saying the backlash was (or wasn't) justified, but it was what it was, and I think this step by Google is a good thing in terms of earning them a bit more trust with that crowd. Whether that's something that actively care about, is anybody's guess.
What are the "number of things"? As much as people are complaining about Reader, I don't see that as bad PR. I assumed it was something other than the Reader fallout.
Agreed, but we're a different audience. As technical people, it is in Google's best interest to look "good" to us so we continue to use and develop things for their platforms. At least that's how I see it.
Reciprocal altruism (i.e. tit-for-tat in game theory) tends to lead toward equilibrium and reduced conflict and aggression over time. Google's decision to publicize and promote this stance is an encouraging development.
"Apart from a few patents listed, we hold a large arsenal of patents that we won't rule out using offensively against both developers AND users of open OR closed source software."
As a software developer and user, I'm not entirely comforted....
"Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
Now that's not a specific promise, so you can argue how much it should count for. But if you take it at face value, it seems reasonable to expect that they will be adding to the list.
By comparison to other companies that have offered a blanket promise to not sue Open Source software over any patents, a promise that only covers a vanishingly small subset of a company's patents seems woefully inadequate.
Is that common? I thought most of those things were limited to specific "fields", (which usually translates into a specific list of specific versions of specific packages).
Not just that - they can also terminate the pledge even if you don't sue Google, but "directly profit" from such a suit, which seems fairly open ended.
This is just a start and I would point out that the MapReduce patents may be their most valuable from a "core business" perspective. This is very positive.
Map reduce is a relatively old google tech, the world and his dog knows, uses, and deploys it. Companies can face an uphill battle enforcing patents on widely used technology (too many large entrenched users with patents of their own come to the fore to defend cases and provide war chests to others).
The newer patents on tech like glass and machine learning are what are particularly concerning for todays startups, many of who are venturing into these areas, and these are nowhere to be seen in this agreement. The recent patents also have the longest shelf life and the most potential for nipping competitors "in the bud".
Unless you are engaged in the multinational legal goings on concerning smartphone patents you'd have to be delusional to think that this announcement has anything to do with you personally.
If you're a startup, and you're planning to grow bigger in any areas of software/hardware/services that google covers (which, to be fair, these days is a very large range of areas), its definitely something to be thinking about.
Google is becoming an entrenched company, they will eventually (or sooner) go from an innovative market position to a defensive one, and thats when patents start to look really juicy to the bean counters.
Also, if you're a developer working for a large google competitor, you may also have reason to fear at least for your job (which is quite personal).
If you want to really draw a line in the sand google, open all your patents, and I will forever support you and your products. Until then, this just feels like lip service.
I think this is an impressive first step, and I love the flow-through that future owners will be equally bound by the terms. Essentially, it gives a permanent free license to use the patents in any open source projects, which can only be an incentive for businesses to make their code open if they can.
I've often wondered, though, why there isn't a consortium to which all the companies with "defensive" software patents can assign them, on condition that if the company get sued for ANY software patent, the consortium will terminate the license to the plaintiff for ALL the patents it holds. The consortium could make that explicit in the license for software patents they offer (for free) to everyone. Sue someone for a software patent and you lose all rights to these others.
That would kill software patents dead in their tracks, I think. There are many elements of that solution in this one announced by Google, but it would be far more effective if every company who hated software patents but held them anyway collaborated.
"The Pledge remains in force for the life of the patents, even if we transfer them."
I realize Google can claim whatever they want, but I don't see how they enforce this pledge for other entities which inherit their patents. How does the pledge actually bind (at a legal level) entities which inherit the patents?
"It is Google’s intent that the Pledge be legally binding, irrevocable (except as otherwise provided under “Defensive Termination” below) and enforceable against Google and entities controlled by Google, and their successors and assigns. Thus, Google will require any person or entity to whom it sells or transfers any of the Pledged Patents to agree, in writing, to abide by the Pledge and to place a similar requirement on any subsequent transferees to do the same." http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge/
Yes. Just 10 patents?! This seems like a joke. It just makes it seem like they cherry picked 10 patents that are probably bogus, valueless or would generate too much bad PR if they ever used them anyway and instead of throwing them away, thought they could make a little PR exercise out of it.
If Google believes in the principle of this move then it should be putting in a very large number of patents, at least every single patent that they have acquired primarily for defensive measures (we hope, most of them). If it doesn't believe in the principle of it then it should not be doing it at all.
I suspect they're just being cautious with the legal side this early on. One reason to be cautious about the patents under the pledge: there might be some grey area in the language where say, a competitor could make hostile moves against Google while still falling under the protection of the pledge via shell companies.
Side note: isn't this already their internal policy? When has Google ever gone after open source projects with any of their patents?
They never have gone after FOSS projects, which makes it all the more strange that they haven't been willing put all their patents under this. Presumably they have no outstanding suits that would be affected.
I don't know. They're trying to create a legal contract that binds them and stays valid as long as the duration of the patent. I'd be pretty careful about putting every patent available under that agreement until I was sure that it couldn't be used against me in an unintended way.
Every single patent has to be reviewed and get the creators to agree. Some patents will have special agreements that might create conflicts with such an agreement.
I definitely think this is a step in the right direction. Its more true to spirit of patents anyways and hopefully will draw more attention to patent trolls in the future. Good move by Google.
Reading patents even remotely related to what you work on has the possibility of increasing the chances any patent infringement suit can be considered willful infringement, which carries a much stiffer range of penalties.
Those who knowingly violate a known patent makes them responsible for treble damages.
This applies much more in the realm of software, because of the idiocy of things like the XOR mouse patent, Amazon 1-Click, and many other obvious 'inventions' that aren't, but were provided patent protection.
In the legal world, that's not meaningless. Simply because one hasn't (yet!) attempted to aggressively assert patents doesn't constitute a defense if one decides to in the future. This might (though it's still not a contract, and I didn't click through to read the terms).
Exactly. IANAL, but from what I've heard from people who are, the basic premise behind these kind of pledges is Estoppel[1]. The basic gist of it, as I understand it, is that you can't go around screaming something in public and treating it as the truth ("anybody can use this patent and we won't sue you") and then later come back and contradict that ("you are violating our patent, pay up"). IOW, promises, made publicly like this, do count for something, even if there's no explicit contract.
What happens when a smaller company makes such a promise, then later they are acquired or sold? If the acquirer is a big amoral company, I wouldn't count on them upholding the promise. And as more and more companies take advantage of a 'safe' technology they think they can't get sued over, the patent gets juicier and juicier as an acquisition target.
I'm not completely sure how it works, but I'd have thought an acquisition of a company with patents involves transferring them patents to the new owner? In that case, they're protected according to Google.
This is a great move. They are simultaneously acting open while also reserving the right to shut down iCloud with a patent suit if Apple sues them in the future. :)
>At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally
Except for Google Maps, GMail, Google Search, Google Apps, AdSense, AdWords, Reader, Code Search, News, or pretty much any of their web apps or which make them money. In those cases, proprietary closed source wins.
There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things, and addresses the benefits of open systems and an open-source stack, even when building closed-sourced software. You may disagree completely with the arguments in the article, but at least it's trying to engage in the subject, which is more than can be said for your sound-bite answer to the first two sentences of the linked blog post.
At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. It always seems a bit artificial when people trot out "middlebrow dismissal", but geez...
>There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things
This is what it says about open systems.
>Another way to look at the difference between open and closed systems is that open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn't have to depend on another's benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don't have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response.
From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming.
>At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences.
From the same link that you site, Google says this:
>We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get.
>Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration.
> This is what it says about open systems.
...
> From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming.
Well it says a good bit more than that. It's certainly not conflating; his argument appears to be that open source is a component of "open systems" (he also calls out "open standards" and "open information" as other components, and explicitly doesn't require all three).
>> At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences.
> From the same link that you site, Google says this:
>> We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get.
>> Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration.
Those aren't contradictory statements.
Just to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that the "open" article is a perfect crystallization of open-source/open-web/open-whatever philosophy, nor would I say that Google has lived up to all the ideals in that article.
"Open systems" remains a poorly defined term at the end of that article (though the individual concepts fare better), the paragraphs on why google has closed-source software is awfully tilted to the "people will game these systems if they are open source" without mentioning the myriad other reason you might (and they do) keep source closed, and the open standards section is a bit prickly these days (I personally don't think not maintaining an RSS feed reader is a blow to standards, as others do, but I remain disappointed that G+ is not a federated system (or moving to one), for instance).
All that said, the original comment remains facile (and not even that, as the statement "Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally" is trivially true, even (or especially) for the products mentioned).
It's very interesting to see the hacker community turn on Google so abruptly over the last year or so. Not sure why, but it seems to me that Google itself has not actually changed its business model much, though its perception has turned radically downward.
I can only speak for myself, but I was done with Google a long time ago.
The 180 on net neutrality, the anti-privacy stance combined with downright illegal (at least in the EU) activities, the pro-active pandering to the copyright mafia, the anti-anonymity policy, the increased geo-tarding or services etcetera.
All of these are not just "things I don't like", they are things that go against the values Google suggested, if not outright proclaimed, they stood for.
Google has turned on the hacker community quite a while ago.
What I find particularly galling is that Google abuses the notion that they stand for openness and global internet freedom as PR-fodder, whilst being one of the most powerful forces in achieving exactly the opposite.
Even Microsoft only went as far as to proclaim their tactics were about "innovation". Google is far more cynical.
It's because all of those instances of "more wood behind fewer arrows" indicate Google is going on a war-footing.
Look at all their more recent activity aside from the not-quite-here-yet Glass and Driverless Car projects:
1) Google+ is an attack against Facebook
2) Shopping Express is attacking Amazon
3) Chromebook and Nexus are attacking Apple and Microsoft directly.
4) Chrome is about to metastasize into a full-on OS, and this can be seen in Google's lack of interest in fixing simple "browser" issues as they put more and more kitchen sink into Chrome.
All of this is well and good - companies need to press their competitors in order to stay profitable and secure.
However, all of this coming at the expense of many their cool projects and widely used services like Reader. What's next, Voice (use G Chat instead)? Blogs (use G+ instead)? It sucks wondering what's next on the chopping block.
If Google is going to war, then they're no longer "nice" or "neutral". Google is throwing down the gauntlet and there's a fear that they'll be as closed as Apple or Microsoft, if they feel it's more profitable.
Sure, and 0) Google is an attack against Yahoo! (1998)
> Google's lack of interest in fixing simple "browser" issues
What do you mean by that? IMHO Chrome is the best browser around these days. In (well, almost) all dimensions - html5 spec feature coverage and quality, speed, security, etc.
Yeah I’ve always wondered why for example Facebook has taken much more flak in tech circles.. Some impressive hacker cognitive dissonance has been going on.. Glad to see this shift in the community!
Many of those are so closely tied to the specifics of Google's data centers or the masses of data collected, that the source would be mostly useless anyway. What differentiates many of these services is not the front-end (it's not like OpenMaps can't do a decent frontend), but the scale. Anyone can write and run a gmail-like service, just look at MailBox.app or Sparrow and the hundreds of webmails that used to exist. Not everyone can do it and serve 500 million users with low latency and high uptime.
I'm guessing it's the former, since it typically takes big companies a long time to pull something like this together and fully execute it.
In any case, it's a good step for Google to suggest that they DO still take openness seriously and are, more or less, still the "don't be evil" company we all came to know.