LaForge's home page (Posts about swpat)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/tags/swpat.atom2022-06-21T07:49:57ZHarald WelteNikolaSoftware under OSA Public License is neither Open Source nor Free Softwarehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160224-oai-osa-licensing/2016-02-24T00:00:00+01:002016-02-24T00:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>It seems my <a class="reference external" href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160201-oai-osa-licensing/">recent concerns on the OpenAirInterface re-licensing</a> were
not unjustified.</p>
<p>I contacted various legal experts on Free Software legal community about
this, and the response was unanimous: In all feedback I received, the
general opinion was that <strong>software under the OSA Public License V1.0 is
neither Free Software nor Open Source Software</strong>.</p>
<p>The rational is, that it does not fulfill the criteria of</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>the FSF <a class="reference external" href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software definition</a>, as the license does
not fulfill <em>freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish,
for any purpose</em> (which obviously includes commercial use)</p></li>
<li><p>the Open Source Initiatives <a class="reference external" href="https://opensource.org/osd-annotated">Open Source Definition</a>, as the license <em>must not
discriminate against fields of endeavor</em>, such as commercial use.</p></li>
<li><p>the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines">Debian Free Software Guidelines</a>, as the DFSG
also require <em>no discrimination against fields of endeavor</em>, such as
commercial use.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I think we as the community need to be very clear about this. We should
not easily tolerate that people put software under restrictive licenses
but still call that software open source. This creates a bad impression
to those not familiar with the culture and spirit of both Free Software
and Open Source. It creates the impression that people can call
something Open Source but then still ask royalties for it, if used
commercially.</p>
<p>It is a shame that entities like Eurecom and the OpenAirInterface
Software Association are <em>open-washing</em> their software by calling it
Open Source when in fact it isn't. This attitude frankly makes me sick.</p>
<p>That's just like <em>green-washing</em> when companies like BP are claiming
they're now an environmental friendly company just because they put some
solar panels on the roof of some building.</p>On the OpenAirInterface re-licensinghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160201-oai-osa-licensing/2016-02-01T00:00:00+01:002016-02-01T00:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>In the recent <a class="reference external" href="https://fosdem.org/2016">FOSDEM 2016</a> SDR Devroom, the
Q&A session following a <a class="reference external" href="https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/oai/">presentation on OpenAirInterface</a> touched the topic of its
controversial licensing. As I happen to be involved deeply with Free
Software licensing and Free Software telecom topics, I thought I might
have some things to say about this topic. Unfortunately the Q&A session
was short, hence this blog post.</p>
<p>As a side note, the presentation was actually certainly the least
technical presentation in all of the FOSDEM SDR track, and that with a
deeply technical audience. And probably the only presentation at all at
FOSDEM talking a lot about "Strategic Industry Partners".</p>
<p>Let me also state that I actually have respect for what OAI/OSA has been
and still is doing. I just don't think it is attractive to the Free
Software community - and it might actually not be Free Software at all.</p>
<div class="section" id="openairinterface-history">
<h2>OpenAirInterface / History</h2>
<p>Within <a class="reference external" href="http://www.eurecom.fr/en">EURECOM</a>, a group around Prof.
Raymond Knopp has been working on a Free Software implementation of all
layers of the LTE (4G) system known as <a class="reference external" href="http://www.openairinterface.org/">OpenAirInterface</a>. It includes the physical layer
and goes through to the core network.</p>
<p>The OpenAirInterface code was for many years under GPL license (GPLv2,
other parts GPLv3). Initially the SVN repositories were not public
(despite the license), but after some friendly mails one (at least I)
could get access.</p>
<p>I've read through the code at several points in the past, it often
seemed much more like a (quick and dirty?) proof of concept
implementation to me, than anything more general-purpose. But then,
that might have been a wrong impression on my behalf, or it might be
that this was simply sufficient for the kind of research they wanted to
do. After all, scientific research and FOSS often have a complicated
relationship. Researchers naturally have their papers as primary output
of their work, and software implementations often are more like a
necessary evil than the actual goal. But then, I digress.</p>
<p>Now at some point in 2014, a new organization the OpenAirInterface
Software Association (OSA) was established. The idea apparently was to
get involved with the tier-1 telecom suppliers (like Alcatel, Huawei,
Ericsson, ...) and work together on an implementation of Free Software
for future mobile data, so-called 5G technologies.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="telecom-industry-and-patents">
<h2>Telecom Industry and Patents</h2>
<p>In case you don't know, the classic telecom industry loves patents.
Pretty much anything and everything is patented, and the patents are
heavily enforced. And not just between Samsung and Apple, or more
recently also Nokia and Samsung - but basically all the time.</p>
<p>One of the big reasons why even the most simple UMTS/3G capable phones
are so much more expensive than GSM/2G is the extensive (and expensive)
list of patents Qualcomm requires every device maker to license. In the
past, this was not even a fixed per-unit royalty, but the license
depended on the actual overall price of the phone itself.</p>
<p>So wanting to work on a Free Software implementation of future telecom
standards <em>with</em> active support and involvement of the telecom industry
obviously means contention in terms of patents.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="re-licensing">
<h2>Re-Licensing</h2>
<p>The existing GPLv2/GPLv3 license of the OpenAirInterface code of course
would have meant that contributions from the patent-holding telecom
industry would have to come with appropriate royalty-free patent
licenses. After all, of what use is it if the software is free in terms
of copyright licensing, but then you still have the patents that make it
non-free.</p>
<p>Now the big industry of course wouldn't want to do that, so the OSA
decided to re-license the code-base under a new license.</p>
<p>As we apparently don't yet have sufficient existing Free Software
licenses, they decided to create a new license. That new license (the
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.openairinterface.org/?page_id=698">OSA Public License V1.0</a>
not only does away with copyleft, but also does away with a normal
patent grant.</p>
<p>This is very sad in several ways:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>license proliferation is always bad. Major experts and basically all
major entities in the Free Software world (FSF, FSFE, OSI, ...) are
opposed to it and see it as a problem. Even companies like Intel and
Google have publicly raised concern about license Proliferation.</p></li>
<li><p>abandoning copyleft. Many people particularly from a GNU/Linux
background would agree that copyleft is a fair deal. It ensures that
everyone modifying the software will have to share such modifications
with other users in a fair way. Nobody can create proprietary
derivatives.</p></li>
<li><p>taking away the patent grant. Even the non-copyleft Apache 2.0
License the OSA used as template has a broad patent grant, even for
commercial applications. The OSA Public License has only a patent
grant for use in research context</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In addition to this license change, the OSA also requires a copyright
assignment from all contributors.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="consequences">
<h2>Consequences</h2>
<p>What kind of effect does this have in case I want to contribute?</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>I have to sign away my copyright. The OSA can at any given point
in time grant anyone whatever license they want to this code.</p></li>
<li><p>I have to agree to a permissive license without copyleft, i.e.
everyone else can create proprietary derivatives of my work</p></li>
<li><p>I do not even get a patent grant from the other contributors (like
the large Telecom companies).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>So basically, I have to sign away my copyright, and I get nothing in
return. No copyleft that ensures other people's modifications will be
available under the same license, no patent grant, and I don't even keep
my own copyright to be able to veto any future license changes.</p>
<p>My personal opinion (and apparently those of other FOSDEM attendees) is
thus that the OAI / OSA invitation to contributions from the community
is not a very attractive one. It might all be well and fine for large
industry and research institutes. But I don't think the Free Software
community has much to gain in all of this.</p>
<p>Now OSA will claim that the above is not true, and that all contributors
(including the Telecom vendors) have agreed to license their patents
under FRAND conditions to all other contributors. It even seemed to me
that the speaker at FOSDEM believed this was something positive in any
way. I can only laugh at that ;)</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="frand">
<h2>FRAND</h2>
<p>FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) is a frequently invoked
buzzword for patent licensing schemes. It isn't actually defined
anywhere, and is most likely just meant to sound nice to people who
don't understand what it really means. Like, let's say, political
decision makers.</p>
<p>In practise, it is a disaster for individuals and small/medium sized
companies. I can tell you first hand from having tried to obtain patent
licenses from FRAND schemes before. While they might have reasonable
per-unit royalties and they might offer those royalties to everyone,
they typically come with ridiculous minimum annual fees.</p>
<p>For example let's say they state in their FRAND license conditions you
have to pay 1 USD per device, but a minimum of USD 100,000 per year. Or
a similarly large one-time fee at the time of signing the contract.</p>
<p>That's of course very fair to the large corporations, but it makes it
impossible for a small company who sells maybe 10 to 100 devices per
year, as the 100,000 / 10 then equals to USD 10k per device in terms of
royalties. Does that sound fair and Non-Discriminatory to you?</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="summary">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>OAI/OSA are trying to get a non-commercial / research-oriented foot into
the design and specification process of future mobile telecom network
standardization. That's a big and difficult challenge.</p>
<p>However, the decisions they have taken in terms of licensing show that
they are primarily interested in aligning with the large corporate
telecom industry, and have thus created something that isn't really Free
Software (missing non-research patent grant) and might in the end only
help the large telecom vendors to uni-directionally consume
contributions from academic research, small/medium sized companies and
individual hackers.</p>
</div>Demonstration against Software Patents at the German Ministry of Justicehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050216-demonstration-berlint/2005-02-16T03:00:00+01:002005-02-16T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday, I was attending the <a href="http://wiki.ffii.org/DemoBerlinBericht050215De">demonstration against software patents</a> at the ministry of justice in Berlin.
</p>
<p>
This demonstration had to be called in on very short notice, because the
European Council has yet again tried to quietly pass the legislation on
software patentes (2002/0047 COM (COD)) as so-called 'B-item' on the agenda of
the council (toe be more precise: the agriculture and fishing council). A
B-item is one that requires no further discussion - which is absolutely wrong.
The European Union has new member states that didn't participate in the
previous discussion, and several member countries' parliaments have made decisions against patentability of software meanwhile...
</p>Upcoming Chaosradio episode on software patentshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20040818-chaosradio-swpat/2004-08-18T03:00:00+02:002004-08-18T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The next <a href="http://chaosradio.ccc.de/">Chaosradio</a> radio show will be
about the ongoing debade on software patents, especially the recent development within the European Union.
</p>
<p>
Being part of the anti software patent movement for about 4-5 years now, I am
more than happy to help with the radio show on this subject.
</p>
<p>
The radio show will be on air on Sept 01, 10pm GMT+2. If you understand
german, there's a MP3 live stream available on the homepage.
</p>"Parlamentary Evening" about software patentshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20040129-parleven/2004-01-29T03:00:00+01:002004-01-29T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday I was invited to a <i>parlamentary evening</i> organized by
<a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/">FFII e.V.</a>, a non-for-profit organization lobbying against the introduction of software patents in the European Union.<br>
As you may know, they've been quite sucessful during the last year, since the
European Parlament passed a directive that prevents any patent on computer
software. However, due to the strange way the EU works, this directive has to
be approved by the EU council before it gets enacted. The council is composed
by representatives of the executive government, not by directly elected members
of parliament.<br>
</p>
<p>
The purpose of this event was to raise awareness about the dangers of software
(and pure algorithmic/logic) patents. Among the invited guests were members of
Bundestag (the german parliament), and various Officials of BMWA, BMBF and BMJ
(economy, research and justice ministries).
</p>
<p>
I received the event as quite well. We were able to make our point and make
them understand why a piece of software is different of somebody making an
invention in the field fo mechanics.
</p>