Last week saw a lot of coverage of Apple’s multitouch-related patent being granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Not surprisingly, messages related to the patent then started to show up on the official Android Google Groups, the ones monitored by the core Android team for supporting both SDK and firmware developers. A few of the moderators asked that discussion of this patent be kept off the one list, leading to some amount of angst.
For many, patents and software go together like oil and vinegar. For some, patents and open source software go together like oil and flamethrowers. Hence, it is not surprising that some advocate ignoring the patent, particularly since it is unclear how many other jurisdictions will grant similar patents to Apple.
What this episode should illustrate to Google and the Open Handset Alliance is that they need to publish a clear statement regarding how copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret concerns will be handled in the public Android project. Obviously, this should cover whether patents can or cannot be discussed on-list. In principle, it should also cover the ground buried in the license grants’ legalese; these grants must be agreed to in order to contribute code to the project. It might also cover things like who should not contribute code to the project to avoid trade secret tainting, violating employment agreements, etc.
But, most of all, this statement needs to be in ordinary language, not legalese, since this is effectively a marketing document aimed at developers.
On the flip side, though, the community needs to respect the decisions the project leads announce regarding such “intellectual property” issues. Armchair amateur strategists can argue until they turn blue in the face over whether or not, say, Nokia will elect to ignore the Apple patents, and those same folk can wax melodramatic about Android’s chances unless it too ignores those patents. However, there are any number of ways the overall Android project could adopt multitouch-like features…and many of those approaches will have to be done outside of the public open source project. Just because certain patents perhaps cannot be discussed on-list does not mean those patents are being forgotten about.
Furthermore, while in the eyes of some, US tech firms’ paranoia about willful infringement and treble damages may be overblown, those firms are welcome to be paranoid, just as others are welcome to be blasé on the issue.
“Intellectual property” concerns like these are the bane of many an open source project’s existence. All a project can do is set ground rules and persevere — Android is in need of both.
