Around eight years ago, a few large companies including tech giants like IBM and Sun Microsystems, pledged to not assert patents against open source software to support its movement in the industry. Unfortunately, these promises didn't exactly hold up in the court of law to help in the avoidance of lawsuits. No other industry players joined these companies to create the listing of patents that would not harm open source IP. (See the full story here at
Foss Patents)
Google pledged a total of 10 patents (yes, only 10 while IBM pledged around 500). You can imagine that this is just a microscopic size of its patent portfolio.
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| Google owns at least 17,000 patents, by estimates. |
As you can imagine, there was no real commitment in Google's pledge other than the positive press that it could achieve by supporting the open source movement. If one tried to find out exactly how many patents Google owns, they would have a hard time, because its very own patent search tool doesn't reassign new owner to second-hand patents unless asserted in court.
So the issue still stands: Google has the power and the right to sue open source developers over at least the 17,000 or so patents that it owns that are not covered under the pledge. So this humongous concept that had good intentions of standing in solidarity for open source--well, it will be even less effective if Google's planning to use those 10 to support open source.
Like you said, it seems like Google is insincere, and perhaps this is a PR stunt. There is so much open source software out there - and Google has so many patents - that it seems unreasonable for them only to have pledged 10 patents.
ReplyDeleteVery nicely written. Before making too many judgements about Google I would like to see what the 10 patents are. I hope no one sues these opensource innovators.
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