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GPL v3

I guess they've started to circulate drafts of version 3 of the General Public License (GPL).   I was at the Advanced Computing Special Interest Group of the MIT Enterprise Forum, and they had a stack of paper copies of the GPLv3.

But I'm lazy.  It is a bunch of legalese.  Somebody needs to write a nice bullet point summary of what they're trying to achive, so I don't have to read boring legal stuff.

I've heard Linus doesn't like it, but I haven't put in the mental energy to follow the discussion. 

Google Libraries

I'm pretty excitied about the Google announcement that they're working with the university libraries of Harvard, University of Michigan (Go Blue!), Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library.  They plan to digitize all the books in the entire library collections.  Only those books in public domain will be available online. 

I can't imagine how cool it will be to do a keyword search on essentially all books that have ever been in print. 

Hopefully this project will create bit more pressure to allow things into the public domain, as Laurence Lessig has suggested with the Eldred Act.

(Via John Palfrey at the Berkman Center, Via Dave.)

Hold down that shift key

It is truly sad that the DMCA can be used for such stupid frivolous lawsuits. You may have heard of the new CD copy protections scheme, which could be bypassed by holding down the shift key when inserting the CD into a computer. As Dan Gilmore reports, the company is suing a Princeton grad student for publishing this information, and trying to get him in criminal trouble under the DMCA. If this purely academic behavoir is criminal, then the laws need to change.

When Piracy is the only way

A few posts ago I talked about how the BBC America was canceling EastEnders. This means that expats like my wife no longer have any way to watch it.

They had an online chat with David Bernath, the Vice President of Programming for BBC AMERICA (transcript). From what he said about their ratings, I calculated that approximately 60,000 people were watching it each week in the U.S. That's only one tenth of their best shows. Given that it is the longest (in minutes) show the aired, it was also the most expensive. I guess it is not enough of an audience to justify having it on a cable network.

The sad thing is that there isn't any legal way for these 60,000 viewers to see their show. The rec.arts.tv.uk.eastenders usenet newsgroup has been buzzing with messages about how to download illegal copies from the internet. "Sparky" posts it to alt.binaries.multimedia each week. That seems to be the only solution. Why isn't there a way to have it magically appear on my TiVO each week for a small charge? Most people have to pay to get access to alt.binaries.multimedia, so they are clearly willing to pay if they could.

Just think of the untapped revenue if companies had a way of targeting little niche markets like these.

In Praise of Patents

I've been thinking about open source business models quite a bit over the past year. In my mind, the most successful model is to dual license the source code for a product. You offer your source under a nice viral GPL-like license, and then offer a commercial license for those customers that want to use your product without releasing their source.

The best known examples are Sleepcat Software's Berkeley DB, Ghostview from Artifex, and MySQL from MySQL AB. (The dual license model is discussed in this post.)

This model works well for these companies because all of their products have a huge codebase. Certainly there must be multiple hundred of thousand lines of code, at least. Given that the open source community can use them for free, there is less incentive for someone of the Free Software bent to reimplement their product.

What if the value of a product is an innovative concept? If I invent something really innovative and useful, and try to go the dual license route, then I'm leaving myself open to what I call "reimplementation risk". That is, someone might reimplement it and release the code under a more liberal license, depriving me of any potential income. Of course, I can also be selling support, but that model doesn't seem to have worked very well for LinuxCare, etc.

One solution to the problem of reimplemention risk is to use patents to protect your idea. Then you can offer your source code, and grant your GPL customers a free patent license. Then your commercial users are getting both software, support, and a patent license.

The only person I know that is using this model is Raph Levien. He has lots of patents and licenses them free for GPL use:

All of the patents listed here are subject to the following patent grant:

Whereas, Raph Levien (hereinafter "Inventor") has obtained patent protection for related technology (hereinafter "Patented Technology"), Inventor wishes to aid the the GNU free software project in achieving its goals, and Inventor also wishes to increase public awareness of Patented Technology, Inventor hereby grants a fully paid up, nonexclusive, royalty free license to practice the patents listed below ("the Patents") if and only if practiced in conjunction with software distributed under the terms of any version of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111. Inventor reserves all other rights, including without limitation, licensing for software not distributed under the GNU General Public License.

He has patents on halftone algorithms, among others. It is the idea, more than the code that is the value.

To me this is a very nice business model. Does anyone out there (Ok, all 3 of you who read my weblog) know if there are other people using this model? Please let me know.

It is very fashionable to be anti-patent. Of course, many of the charges are true. The US Patent office will let you get a patent on any damn fool thing these days, and they are really best used as legal weapons of big companies. (IBM is charging that SCO violates 4 of their patents. Well, of course they do. IBM has so many patents that every person in this country must violate an IBM patent by getting out of bed. ... but I digress.)

This is one case where patents can be useful to the little guy. It would let you share, without giving it all away. Any comments on this post would be appreciated, as I've been thinking about this idea for quite a while.

Doc on Who Owns What

Go read Doc Searls' latest column in Linux Journal. He argues that allowing big companies to discuss intellectual property strictly in terms of property rights is a losing proposition.