Sue them for using open source software that Nokia itself released? That sounds amusing.
No, this is fine legally. What's more difficult is that huge chunks of "Nokia MeeGo" (which is frustratingly different from "Intel MeeGo" in a lot of ways) aren't actually open source. They released most of the middleware, but none of the apps.
Presuming Nokia had the desire to sue them, it would more than likely be about trade secrets (assuming there's a Finnish equivalent) vs. the software itself. Bunch of ex-Nokia employees, it'd be easy to make a case (despite any merit) that one of them is using some Nokia secrets they shouldn't be.
That's an interesting reasoning. I wonder how many patents Nokia has that will be useless against Android because Nokia released MeeGo as open source.
Right now, I consider Nokia a tool for Microsoft to push Windows Phone onto the market. Whether they consider this a distraction or a threat will be evident by their reaction.
Releasing software as open source does not invalidate patents. What happens is that if the software infringes, then you cannot use it even though it is open source.
You seem to believe that Nokia's having open-sourced some software confers on users and re-distributors of that software some sort of protection against Nokia's patents -- that certain behaviors that would have been infringement in the absence of the open-source license are somehow no longer infringement. If that is what you believe, I disagree.
Sometimes a corporation will grant a license of any patents need to run a piece of open-source software -- IBM did that in the 1990s in regard to Linux -- but I do not know of any open-source licenses that incorporates such a patent licensing. Certainly GPL 2 does not.
In other words, sometimes a patent holder will make a legally-binding promise not to sue any user or re-distributor of an open-source software for patent infringement, but all the open-source licenses I know restrict themselves to copyright and, to the first order, are silent on patents. (The qualification "to the first order" is necessary because IIRC GPL 2 includes language to the effect that if you try to use patents (or any other means -- but the language was added to address software patents) to discriminate among the recipients of your GPLed "changes", you lose the right to re-distribute the changes at all -- but note well that this language does not prevent a contributor of some changes from using its patents to stop the re-distribution of the changes altogether.)
The GPLv2 provides an implicit patent license. Imagine you hold a patent and publish some code that implements your patent under the GPLv2. Everyone who gets the program from you is granted, by the GPL, the right to use it. In order to use it, they'll need a license to your patent, which you can't deny because of the GPL. The GPL also stipulates they can give this program to other people, provided it is under the same terms. This grants downstream users the same rights to use your patents your direct clients have.
>Imagine you hold a patent and publish some code that implements your patent under the GPLv2. Everyone who gets the program from you is granted, by the GPL, the right to use . . . your patent, which you can't deny because of the GPL.
It is rare that one can say with certainty how a court will find, so let me just point out that neither Eben Moglen nor the FSF agree with your position as quoted above. To be exact, their position as of the late 1990s (when I studied the GPL) is the opposite of your position, and they are very unlikely to have changed their position since then.
It depends on the license. Apache and L/GPLv3 both have explicit patent grants (GPLv2 does not). Most of what Nokia released was LGPLv2 I think.
But regardless, I think there's a clear good faith argument to be made there. Telling the world "use this great stuff for free" and then suing them when they do it certainly seems counter to the spirit of good faith patent licensing.
Nokia can't. They contributed to Meego (which is inherited in Mer) under the terms of GPL. All they can do is to bite their elbows now for ditching Meego.
I really really really hope they do succeed. I have seen my friends N9 and its an absolutely amazing phone....except that nobody (except hobbyist's) develop for it
I was really excited until they mentioned a rewrite in favor of "Html5". It's really hard for me to understand why do sane people choose resource-hungry technology to work on resource-constrained hardware despite existence of much better alternatives (Qt) over and over again. This doesn't make any sense to me. There will be performance issues for sure. The same way as they were with WebOS which happily consumed 1GB of ram (Touchpad) when 256MB would be more than enough for a native solution and could have provided a much better end-used experience (Original iPad.)
WebOS heavily relies on Qt itself. Significant amount of internal infrastructure is written using it. I can't understand why didn't they officially provide Qt as a alternative way to write Apps for WebOS. It must have been a political decision ("we are WebOS, not QtOS".)
Blackberry people are the ones who actually understood how good Qt actually is for such kind of thing and they are pushing it now as the native toolkit.
Qt could have become a common denominator for mobile operating systems outside of the Android/iOS world. It would have helped with shortage of applications (as developers could have hypothetically wrote a very similar app for Blackberry, MeeGo and WebOS at the same time) and would ease porting of successful apps from iOS.
I wrote down some lessons from the Maemo and MeeGo times in light of the Jolla announcement. Long read but can give some perspective http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadNo, this is fine legally. What's more difficult is that huge chunks of "Nokia MeeGo" (which is frustratingly different from "Intel MeeGo" in a lot of ways) aren't actually open source. They released most of the middleware, but none of the apps.
Right now, I consider Nokia a tool for Microsoft to push Windows Phone onto the market. Whether they consider this a distraction or a threat will be evident by their reaction.
Sometimes a corporation will grant a license of any patents need to run a piece of open-source software -- IBM did that in the 1990s in regard to Linux -- but I do not know of any open-source licenses that incorporates such a patent licensing. Certainly GPL 2 does not.
In other words, sometimes a patent holder will make a legally-binding promise not to sue any user or re-distributor of an open-source software for patent infringement, but all the open-source licenses I know restrict themselves to copyright and, to the first order, are silent on patents. (The qualification "to the first order" is necessary because IIRC GPL 2 includes language to the effect that if you try to use patents (or any other means -- but the language was added to address software patents) to discriminate among the recipients of your GPLed "changes", you lose the right to re-distribute the changes at all -- but note well that this language does not prevent a contributor of some changes from using its patents to stop the re-distribution of the changes altogether.)
I'd love to see this tested in court.
It is rare that one can say with certainty how a court will find, so let me just point out that neither Eben Moglen nor the FSF agree with your position as quoted above. To be exact, their position as of the late 1990s (when I studied the GPL) is the opposite of your position, and they are very unlikely to have changed their position since then.
This will probably be my last reply to you.
But regardless, I think there's a clear good faith argument to be made there. Telling the world "use this great stuff for free" and then suing them when they do it certainly seems counter to the spirit of good faith patent licensing.
WebOS heavily relies on Qt itself. Significant amount of internal infrastructure is written using it. I can't understand why didn't they officially provide Qt as a alternative way to write Apps for WebOS. It must have been a political decision ("we are WebOS, not QtOS".)
Blackberry people are the ones who actually understood how good Qt actually is for such kind of thing and they are pushing it now as the native toolkit.
Qt could have become a common denominator for mobile operating systems outside of the Android/iOS world. It would have helped with shortage of applications (as developers could have hypothetically wrote a very similar app for Blackberry, MeeGo and WebOS at the same time) and would ease porting of successful apps from iOS.
Mer apparently runs both Qt/QML and HTML5 happily, so I don't see why this has to be one or the other. The Cordia UX built on Mer even builds on GTK3.