Hi all Thanks for the responses and interest.
There were a few questions about the strategic vision for encouraging network effects around this initiative. The problem for open source created by patents affecting software is vast and, compared to the size of other software and internet companies and their resources, Mozilla is tiny. This means we will not be able to address the problem with brute force or mountains of cash. However, we've seen this movie before in the early days of the open source movement. So, our approach was to study in detail both the groundbreaking licensing that resulted in the GPL, MPL and the Mozilla project itself and the way patents and patent licensing regimes have evolved over time. We learned a few things: (i) No one license seems to work for everyone - and patent licensing is traditionally even more custom to an entity than copyright licensing. This resulted in 3 things: (1) We made a goal to strike the balance between openness and flexibility to the licensor that we believe the MPL does so well, but in a pure patent license as our expression of what this could look like. (2) We designed for flexibility and interoperability with other open patent licensing regimes. Just like other compatibility issues, we may not be able to solve all of them, but tried to handle in an open way in the cross license requirement. (3) We decided to ask someone with some major history in open source licensing to help draft the license text itself (Heather Meeker @ O'Melveny and Meyers). (ii) Our portfolio is not large enough by itself to create openness in the world. We are innovative and impactful, but we don't have the resources of a large software company. Therefore, our hope here is that individuals, companies and projects strongly consider what they can do to encourage innovation through open software patent licensing. In addition to MOSPL, there are other initiatives we mention in our post that are doing this now and we'd love to see broader adoption of these types of initiatives. There were a few questions relating to what happens to the licenses we already use. We described how this works in our FAQ (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/patents/), questions 1 and 3. The goal of MOSPL and its surrounding work is to create an open patent license that flips the patent right from exclusive to inclusive for open innovation; specifically in situations when folks were not taking our code (licensed under MPL, etc.) or implementing a spec we have licensed as a part of a standard (Opus standard, etc.). To illustrate how this works, let's use Laura as an example. Laura is a coder in an open source project who wants to use the tech embodied in a claim of one of our patents in a separate codec in a way that does not implement the Opus spec or use our source code. Without the MOSPL, Laura would be infringing the patent and be subject to the issues that come with infringement. However, if Laura complies with the terms of the license, she is immediately granted the rights under the license to all of our patents. And, she doesn't have to file anything or join a pool - it works automatically like open source licenses themselves. This also means that folks using our code have no change to their rights under those other licenses unless they want to take under the new license - this was important to ensure. There were a few questions about the license text itself. Licenses are complicated and are hard to summarize. However, we tried to do this on the website (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/patents/). Here's the text from the relevant paragraph: "The MOSPL grants you a license to make, use, or distribute any software that would be covered by one of our patents, so long as (i) you don't offensively sue, threaten, or accuse anyone's Software of infringing your patents (using your portfolio to defend yourself against a prior-filed patent lawsuit is OK) and (ii) you agree to grant (upon request) your own royalty-free license under any patents you own to all open-source software projects that agree or have agreed to be bound by the MOSPL." Hopefully this helps answer a few questions about the text as well - the license itself continues to be the definitive authority. Thanks Jishnu On Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 9:31:37 AM UTC-8, Gervase Markham wrote: > On 03/11/15 14:54, [email protected] wrote: > > Additionally, if you have any questions we can answer, please also > > let us know. Looking forward to hearing your feedback! > > It seems perhaps like an opportunity has been missed to establish a > patent commons. Did you ponder the possibility of writing the license a > touch more generically, so other companies could use it unmodified, and > then having section 4 say: > > "If you bring a Claim, the licenses granted to you under all instances > of this agreement by any Licensor will immediately terminate as of the > date you bring such Claim." > > In other words, by expanding the loss suffered, raise the stakes for > patent aggression, raise the value of being "inside the tent", and build > a commons of companies who are mutually interlocked in a non-aggression > stance. > > Gerv _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
