IT IS PROBABLY obvious by now that among the benefactors of the patent system there are the monopolies in their respective field (the other benefactors being the patent lawyers/patent trolls).
By becoming a licensee, the Ruby Association has joined the growing list of companies that recognize the importance of leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation.
Google has granted a license for one of its patents to the Apache Hadoop open source framework for distributed computing. Larry Rosen, the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) legal counsel, says that several weeks ago he contacted Google about its recently granted MapReduce process patent – patent 7,650,331 ("System and method for efficient large-scale data processing") – for fear that it may be infringed by implementations of Hadoop or other Apache MapReduce projects.
“It also sends out the signal that companies which vend Linux support software patents, by practice.”The main problem we have with IBM's and Google's attitude is that this practice gives ammunition to Microsoft's similar tricks with its useless "Community Promise" and the likes of that. It also sends out the signal that companies which vend Linux support software patents, by practice. Later on, when Microsoft attacks Android with software patents (and by inference hurting Linux, which Android contains inside of it), the Linux defense is weakened, the obvious excuse being "hypocrisy" or whatever.
To Google's credit, it works on creating an "open source" codec (usually meaning Free software-friendly as there are no software patents) and it helped fund Ogg for small devices. According to this press release from a few days ago, a lot of money is being spent on codecs right now, due to software patents.
Xorcom, a privately-held manufacturer of business telephony interfaces and appliances based on Asterisk open source software, and Howler Technologies, the high definition voice and video transcoding company, and providers of a wide range of cost-effective, carrier-grade transcoding solutions to the telecoms industry, announced today that they have successfully completed interoperability testing between Xorcom’s IP-PBX models and Howler Technologies’ G.729 software codec for Asterisk, known as “Howlet”.
[...]
“Howlet allows Xorcom integrators to avoid the responsibility of paying the license fee for the Open Source version of the G.729 codec (for which initial license fees are approximately $25,000 – $30,000), since Howlet is GPLv2 compliant and includes the G.729 Patent Royalty,” notes Eran Gal, CEO, Xorcom. “It supports our standard software platforms — Asterisk, Elastix and trixbox — out-of-the-box, so implementation is a breeze.”
Comments
Yuhong Bao
2010-05-04 01:45:54
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-05-04 06:38:25
Yuhong Bao
2010-05-04 01:26:07