Google has announced it is adding 79 patents to its open source patent non-assertion pledge. Of course the pledge is limited only to things where the patents infringed are within the open source element … so no mixing a bit of FOSS into your proprietary application and hoping you’ll get coverage. Although there are 79 patents in the new batch, there aren’t 79 ideas in there. The count includes patents in each territory too, so take “Computer network for www server data access over internet” that patent is counted ten times, for Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Taiwan and the US. And that’s quite an old patent which will expire in the US in June 2015… do read it if you want a blast from the past with its OS/2 Warp systems and RS/6000s.
Anyway, counting out the double counting, I make it 38 actual different patents spread around the globe. The original ten patents in Google’s first pledge were all US patents related to MapReduce so this double counting didn’t occur. Let’s call the total number of different patents 48… out of Google’s estimated (inc Motorola portfolio) of, albeit patents for the same things in different territories, 18,000+ patents. Some folks call it a drip-feed but it’s more akin to open source patent homeopathy. The dilution is so extreme that it will make no difference to the problem and any improvement in the patient’s condition are unlikely to come from this treatment. Google should take a page from Red Hat’s book - their patent promise covers all their software patents, no lists, no donation dramatica.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog