What is a Smart Grid?
What is a Smart Grid? How should it look like? Well, the answer depends on who you ask.
There is a general consensus that:
Welcome to the second week in standards.
This week we have a range of announcements from Telecoms, Cloud, Privacy and other domains
During August, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum focused towards a number of issues related to the tension between traditional software development business models, FRAND and RAND IPR licensing requirements and the open source community. The event was structured such that two featured articles were posted by Talkstandards regular Stacy Baird (Managing Director of Citrus Co.) and James Bryce Clark (from OASIS). In response to these featured articles, a series of expert contributors were invited to post introductory remarks, upon which the event discussion took place. These articles are summarized below. Please follow the links to access the articles in full.
Patents have long served to enable innovation while assuring the complete disclosure of inventions and a reasonable return to inventors. Many open standards incorporate patented inventions. To ensure public access to IP in open standards, governments and industry have supported an equal rights provision: reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing for patents included in standards. But for some, equality is insufficient. Some in the OSS community want to do away with these royalties (or any other RAND based licensing terms, such as scope of use or prohibitions on sublicensing) all together.
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As you know, open standards work and open source code development have some similarities. Both systems are designed to permit strangers to collaborate in joint design. Both have rules for discovering and filtering private patent or copyright claims, with the goal that end-users can access and use the outputs safely. While they’re two distinct systems, usually they are complementary, not in opposition.
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There is a lot of discussion around how free and open source software (FOSS) can be used in a scalable business and what business models support using FOSS. This is often captured in questions about how one makes money when one gives the product away for free. Likewise there are concerns raised over how IPR rights in standards organizations need to be managed to enable FOSS implementations. A few definitions help tease apart the discussions so various paths through become apparent. For this discussion I’ll assume the actors are all well behaved, i.e. no plagiarists, submarines, or trolls.
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What is the problem? Is this actually a “problem” or a matter of differing goals? What is the lesson? Is it possible that the real problem is the market distortion that could occur when advocates from one side promote government intervention to their advantage (and to the disadvantage of other development and distribution models)? Government policy makers contemplating to alter rules affecting standards setting must exercise extreme caution.
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Reflections on the nature of the problem for the economy caused by the potential tension between standards with IPRs and OSS
This article is co-authored by Anne Layne-Farrar and Daniel Garcia-Swartz (bio Here)
As fellow commenter Stacy Baird notes in his contribution to today’s discussion, all open source licenses are not created equal – hard line licenses, like the GPL, place more restrictions on users and thus create tensions with RAND/FRAND that don’t otherwise exist. Indeed, open source and IPR protected software frequently coexist quite peaceably.
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There are some open source advocates who have framed this debate somewhat broadly by suggesting that a RAND-based license which includes a royalty is incompatible with open source licenses. For example, by using phrases such as “RAND discriminates against Open Source developers” or “RAND is incompatible with OSS,” they seek to reinforce this broad problem statement.
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Proponents of open source software are a creative bunch. Their flexible, open and collaborative way of working has certainly led to innovation not only in software development but also in the way that we now view many aspects of public policy.
On the positive side, the understanding of open source principles and ways of working has motivated us all to be more transparent, more open to creative partnerships and to place a premium on innovation as a public good.
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