[occi-wg] ElasticHosts statement on Patent Licensing relating to OCCI

[Tim Bray]

On May 27, 2009, at 9:04 AM, Sam Johnston wrote:

> Here's hoping we'll see something from both Sun and GoGrid in due  
> course.

Normally, this is the kind of thing that Sun's been very good at.   
There's some correspondence going around, internally.  At this point,  
however, anything that represents a nontrivial corporate commitment is  
probably needs routing through the Sun-Oracle integration team; those  
guys are all about distilling sanity out of Oracle's 80k headcount as  
combined with Sun's 30k, and are possibly the most overworked group on  
the planet right now.  So, probably count on delays.  Hey, if someone  
from Oracle wanted to speak up pre-emptively...

> FWIW the OGF IPR policy is drawn into the membership agreement so  
> member companies are covered across the board...

Does our having signed up to this make any difference?  Thijs?  Alexis?

And I hate to end on a cynical note, but in practice this whole patent- 
coverage exercise probably doesn't mean a damn thing.  Anyone with  
exposure to the dismal universe of software patents would probably  
agree with my guess that there are tons of 'em out there covering  
every little aspect of anything we might do, many held by people who  
aren't OGF members or haven't even heard of "Cloud Computing" at this  
point.  Yes, it's nice when people who are *in the process* do non- 
asserts, and I support that.  But typically those people aren't the  
problem.

But there is good news, too.  Unlike the situation in the hardware  
world, I'm not aware of anyone ever having successfully set up a  
patent-based tollbooth on a software-only Internet protocol deployment.

FWIW, my own position: RAND is 100% unacceptable because it rules out  
open-source solutions.  Protocols which require any kind of licensing  
whatsoever cannot be used on the Internet.  -Tim