[ A similar version was crossposted on Conservancy's blog. ]
Folks lauded today that Microsoft has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN)'s limited patent non-aggression pact, suggesting that perhaps it will bring peace in our time regarding Microsoft's historical patent aggression. While today's announcement is a step forward, we call on Microsoft to make this just the beginning of their efforts to stop their patent aggression efforts against the software freedom community.
The OIN patent non-aggression pact is governed by something called the Linux System Definition. This is the most important component of the OIN non-aggression pact, because it's often surprising what is not included in that Definition especially when compared with Microsoft's patent aggression activities. Most importantly, the non-aggression pact only applies to the upstream versions of software, including Linux itself.
We know
that Microsoft has done patent troll shakedowns in the past on Linux products
related to the exfat filesystem.
While we
at Conservancy were successful in getting the code that implements exfat for
Linux released under GPL (by Samsung), that code has not been upstreamed
into Linux. So, Microsoft has not included any patents they
might hold on exfat into the patent non-aggression pact.
We now ask Microsoft, as a sign of good faith and to confirm its intention to end all patent aggression against Linux and its users, to now submit to upstream the exfat code themselves under GPLv2-or-later. This would provide two important protections to Linux users regarding exfat: (a) it would include any patents that read on exfat as part of OIN's non-aggression pact while Microsoft participates in OIN, and (b) it would provide the various benefits that GPLv2-or-later provides regarding patents, including an implied patent license and those protections provided by GPLv2§7 (and possibly other GPL protections and assurances as well)
