Fedora and Software Patents

A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a government to a patent holder for a limited period of time, usually 20 years from the earliest effective filing date of the patent application. These monopoly rights are granted to patent applicants in exchange for their disclosure of the invention claimed by the patent. Once a patent is granted in a given country, the patent holder may exclude someone from making, using, selling or importing embodiments of the claimed invention in that country. Software patents are different from copyright or trademarks despite being lumped together with them under the collective term Intellectual Property.

The Fedora Project is not a separate and distinct legal entity. Red Hat, the primary sponsor of the Fedora Project, is actively involved in legal matters relating to Fedora, along with other Fedora participants. For example, Red Hat lawyers assist Fedora Project contributors in issues pertaining to free and open source software licensing, trademarks and patents. Refer to the Legal page for more information.

Contrary to common belief, software patents are granted in some form or other in most countries, including most of the countries in which most Fedora participants reside.

A codec is a set of methods to encode and decode video or audio information into a data stream. In the case of codecs like WMV, the company or companies associated with developing the format are also involved in asserting (or restrictively licensing) patents that purportedly cover the format; we refer to such codecs as "patent encumbered". Other codecs, such as WebM, Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis, Dirac, and FLAC, are made available by their developers without asserting patents on their implementations; we refer to such codecs as "patent unencumbered". Fedora includes comprehensive support for open, patent-unencumbered codecs but is unable to include support for the patent encumbered ones.

Patent licenses usually require the licensee to pay royalties based on the number of users. Since Fedora is free and open source software, the effective number of users is essentially unrestricted. Patent holders are generally unwilling to give a blanket patent license for unlimited use; moreover, the royalty payments would be too high for it to be practical for the Fedora Project, or its sponsors, to pay them. Proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows include the costs of third-party patent licenses in the pricing of the product as sold to end users. Fedora is not sold commercially, so there is no way to recoup these substantial expenses.

Even if funds were available to do so, such royalty-bearing patent licenses would have to be compatible with the free/open source software licenses governing the software covered by the patent license. In practice this is usually challenging. For example, the most widely-used FOSS licenses (GPL and LGPL) place constraints on the ability of distributors to distribute software under benefit of third-party patent licenses. Even if the software in question is placed under some other license, distributing such software under benefit of a patent license may make the software effectively non-free and thus incompatible with Fedora legal policies.

When we speak of an implementation being FOSS, usually we are thinking only in terms of copyright licensing. An independent FOSS implementation of a patent-encumbered codec, however, is subject to at least as much patent risk as, say, some proprietary reference implementation of the same codec. Note that while copyright covers only a particular implementation of software, patents are broader because they are more abstract, covering ideas that might be implemented in software in any number of ways.

In general, no, because of the risk of liability for contributory patent infringement.

There are different reasons:

Even if you are willing to pay for patent licenses, there are other things to consider:

Note that this isn’t even restricted to patented media formats - the same applies to popular proprietary formats used for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.

For more information about how software patents are bad, refer to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.

Fedora cannot include the decoders necessary to do this since those are patent encumbered as well. Although users might be able to do this, converting from one format to another typically results in a visible loss of quality. The only long term viable method is to encourage the creation of content in open formats and Fedora and Red Hat actively encourage and participate in such activities.

In support of free culture and the open web, and to reduce the hold of proprietary and patent encumbered codecs, Red Hat has been sponsoring improvements on the open Ogg Theora video codec.

Instead of Windows Media, use WebM or Ogg Theora. Instead of Microsoft Office Open XML, use Open Document format documents, or even PDF. Vote with your currency by purchasing hardware and solutions that support these free and open formats.

Imagine sitting down to your email. Your sister has sent you some pictures of your niece. However, when you go to look at them, all you see is:

I’m sorry, you need Frobozz Viewer 3.0 to view this file. It’s only $19.99, have your credit card ready.

Later, you go to view your mail on a public computer at the local library. And you get the same dialog box on their computer.

That is the reality for any sound, image, or document format that is encumbered by software patents that require licensing - any application that wishes to view, play, or create them requires paying the patent holders a fee. Normally, software and hardware vendors include this support, but they pass the costs directly onto the consumers in the cost of their software or hardware.

Fedora, however, has a public promise to always be freely redistributable by anyone. That is why Fedora cannot include support for patented media formats - it would break this redistribution promise. Fedora supports open media formats such as WebM or Ogg Vorbis and Theora, which are freely implementable and usable by anyone without a patent license.

Red Hat has consistently taken the position that software patents generally impede innovation in software development and that software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software. Red Hat holds several software patents for defensive purposes and has a patent policy under which it agrees to refrain from enforcing its patents against any party for exercising rights under certain free and open source software licenses, including GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPLv2.1, and LGPLv3.