28 replies
10h50m
if you’re a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally
Is this really true? I assume the licensing legalese means patents, and patents don't apply to private tinkering unless there's commerce involved.
More generally aside from hobby scope - The absurdity of the monopolies granted by the current patent regime are made obvious by this arrangement: Big companies that have patent portfolios to countersue with can use OpenThread freely, small businesses and startups can't.
(Obviously it still sucks and is a major chilling effect)
The quoted part above is about shipping products too, so I don't understand why they are using that as an example about not being able to play around with something or write blog posts. Here's the FAQ question
Answer, also quotes in the post:
It feels like even sharing my designs run a major risk of landing me in trouble. This sounds catastrophically hostile to open source in general.
If I ever want to make use of what I've built in any even remotely commercial setting, everything I've built feels liable to be infected & polluted with this copyright. I could rip out Threads & still not feel safe. I definitely can't sell a couple copies of this cool thing to other hobbyists on indiegogo.
The terms of use essentially outlaw community. Yes, maybe hobbyists can play with this, but they cannot form communities, they cannot share wisdom, they can't sell boards to each other, they can't even talk about the protocol or spec on detail.
So yeah, hobbyists arent expressly forbidden. But having any community of hobbyists seems fraught with difficulties. You can only hobbyist by yourself, discussing with no one.
Fuck Threads.
Hang on that's a huge leap.
But it just says you can't ship products and talking isn't shipping a product. The only part I see there is what if you sell things built on it.
Like sure it could be more open and sure having some small business exemption would be good but that's not the same as not being allowed to just make some stuff and talk about it.
You're talking to the question, but the answer is even more conservative & scary than the question posed,
Under this, it sounds like one isn't even allowed to dabble with Thread without $7.5k/year membership. You aren't allowed to practice is the words they respond with, which seems far more constraining than shipping.
Re-quoting the licensing agreement requires to download the spec,
So yeah, actually it seems like even doing hobbyist things by yourself & telling no one is still far more than Thread group allows.
Fuck Thread! It's just so unbelievably shitty having the connected device technologies of our world be un-practiceable by mere mortals.
and ship.
As a software engineer, our confidence that and means "both of these things" is high. I feel like you're taking quite a gamble doing that in law.
Anyone posting to a blog might also be regarded as shipping.
You're also focusing on one gotcha while ignoring the other terrifying clauses here. Are you still using the spec for internal purposes if you are talking about it?
IANAL but I strongly recommend any hobbyists or open source people steer the hell clear. These are terms for no engagement other than those willing to pay the anual fee.
Not conferred the rights to practice and ship, but if there's something which doesn't require such rights (such are private home tinkering) then not having rights conferred isn't an issue.
Not saying that forgives this abysmal licensing regime of course.
What do you think they mean by this:
That if you are a corporation that wants to use this tech in your products (devices) you are advised to join Thread Group as soon as possible because you'll be required to do that when you ship stuff anyways. Possibly compelled by court if you resist.
They probably didn't expect interest from singular hobbyists, let alone hobbyists reading what they put out in the most uncharitable fashion. They have some clarifying to do if they decide that they care.
You are ignoring "practice", which in this context means any kind of operational use, including things like research (they also specify "implementation" separately, to explicitly cover development of products).
Practice here is as in "practice medicine", not "practice for tryouts".
Lawyers have little issue defining blogs like mine as "with commercial interest". I have a side-business, so lawyers could make the argument that I use my blog as advertising. I have a Ko-Fi link in the bottom of one specific site, that's a commercial interest, too.
Unless your blog is "I'm sharing holiday photos and nothing else", there's a lot of instances where it could be define as an outlet with commercial interests.
And, ultimately, I have no desire to spend any time and money on fighting even completely invalid claims. I'd rather spend my time watching cat videos on YouTube instead.
But their licensing doesn't care about commercial interests or lack of there of.
It only reserves right to charge you if you ship a product. And by product they most obviously mean a device and by ship they obviously mean sell (or gift, or possibly rent) to some customers.
All of this sounds like a thunderstorm in a glass of water by people who read too many software licenses.
This is not what the license says.
Then don't use this or teach it. Don't build for it. Isolate it. Let it die. Cut off its supply. Make it irrelevant. Exclude it from connectivity options by default, out of caution. It seems pointless to complain that you can't have a bite of the poison fruit.
But also make sure others know. Actively warn and discourage other developers away from that technology. Make "Threads" regret their lack of openness.
The problem is that individuals cannot cut it out, because big tech firms use it pretty widely. It's basically a moat that allows companies to ship products using a shared standard, but makes it impossible for individual developers to (especially ones who aren't actively trying to start a business, but even then, $7500 a year is a lot for a garage-level startup for a technical standard).
Imagine how much less innovation there would be if it cost $7,500 a year to write anything that uses the Internet Protocol suite of standards.
Also, I don't think it helps to use this word "hobbyists".
The entire world runs on free open source software written by unpaid volunteers who are poorly supported, isolated, and exploited by mega tech corporations that are parasitical on their work.
"hobbyists" sounds demeaning, It makes it sound like the great under-structure of common coding is somehow less-than-serious, somehow outside some commercial ecosystem rather than the very soil and food that sustains it.
This (self) perception needs to change. Big Tech would die tomorrow without the "hobbyists" it depends on.
It's seems pretty clear-cut to me:
Q: What Would Prevent A Company From Shipping A Product Based On OpenThread Without Joining The Thread Group?
A: (roughly) You will be sued
Now, what does the word "product" in "Shipping a product based on OpenThread" mean?
A product is any (or some combination of) the following:
1. A devkit
2. A book
3. A blog post
4. Any hardware that uses Thread
So, yeah, you can't write a tutorial for using Thread, or make a doorbell for your mum's house, or tell your friend how to read the protocol, or start up a /r/thread community to help each other use it.
Looks pretty damned locked down to me, without at least the FRAND loopholes.
Where is that definition of product from? Is that in their license agreement?
What is your definition of a product based on (from their license) "Thread technology and Thread Group specifications"?
Why would a book, or tutorial, or blog post be excluded from the clause "Thread technology and Thread Group specifications"?
Obviously a device because when hardware peopl say product they don't mean book or youtube video.
These aren't "hardware people" writing the licenses, they're "legal people", i.e. lawyers.
Obviously only 1 and 4. Neither book or post uses tech. It can talk about tech, describe it, but never use it in any manner.
Mum's doorbell might be gray area as you can easily say that it's still your doorbel, you just chose to install it wherever you chose to install it.
There's no way that a book or blog post breaches any patents.
While you’re unlikely to be sued for something you do in your basement that has no broader commercial or cultural impact, it’s not impossible. There is no private use exemption to patents.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24148/can-i-build-so...
This isn't 100% true, it's closer to 90% true.
There is a narrowly-tailored "research exemption" to patents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption
So "private tinkering" where you implement something patented in order to perform research is permitted, but not for one's own benefit, even privately. For the example we're discussing, implementing Thread on some IoT device in order to benchmark it in various ways is in-bounds, but you can't use that device to your own benefit, even privately in your own home.
Aye. And, as the sibling post points out, demonstrating that your benchmarking project qualifies for a Research Exemption could devolve into a lawyer-up situation.
Something surprising that a couple lawyers have drilled into me: you can be sued for anything, regardless of whether it's illegal or not. The lawsuit is the discovery & decision process by which the courts decide whether your personal circumstances make it illegal. If the law is blatantly on your side you can get the lawsuit thrown out, but you still have to defend yourself, which includes the expense of hiring a lawyer.
A corollary (and probably what the lawyers were getting at): not making yourself a target is more valuable than actually following the law. If you have money, keep it to yourself - some more unscrupulous actors will find some legal grey area you're operating in and sue you for it simply so they can force a settlement and get some of it. If you're doing something interesting (whether it's legal or not), keep it to yourself. If your interests are not aligned with someone else, gosh darnit, don't tell them or otherwise bring yourself to their attention. There is probably some lawsuit they can bring that would at least force an expensive court case and legal defense and make you want to settle to make it all go away.
And once you are a target anyway, follow the law scrupulously. This is why big corporations invest billions in legal & compliance departments.
As always with laws this is very location specific. In germany there is a very clear clause about patents not applying to "Actions carried out in the private sphere for non-commercial purposes" (§11 PatG, own translation)