“I am not authorizing you to release a Ruby port of Metaphone 3”

https://github.com/threedaymonk/text/issues/21#issuecomment-67752327

by matthewmacleod • 12 years ago

300 208 12 years ago

github.com

meric• 12 years ago

I think the author of the algorithm implementation would have benefited more from a patent than a BSD copyright notice.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Considering the last comment on github, the patent office would probably deny the application.

jacalata3• 12 years ago

Are you talking about iand's comment [0]? How does it indicate that?

[0] https://github.com/threedaymonk/text/issues/21#issuecomment-...

lukeredpath2• 12 years ago

Is this the patent for the algorithm in question?

http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

steventhedev2• 12 years ago

Hardly. Alice v CLS only throws out claims based on "performed on a general purpose computer". Mostly, that is enough to refute the remainder of the claims, as they apply to generic mathematical algorithms.

Systems such as this, however, have enjoyed patent protection in the past (Soundex, notably), and his own metaphone and double metaphone systems are cited in several other patents. Google patent search is your friend here.

Snarky comment: The USPTO has a habit of not denying any applications.

VLM• 12 years ago

"I think the author of the algorithm implementation would have benefited more from..."

Well obviously the meta argument, taking a step back, is if the community insists on porting to ruby, doing all the work for him, such that the happy and cooperative leader can now collect sweet support contracts from MORE corporate users and increase the resume fodder value of his original product...

What looks better on dude's resume:

Author of a Java library with 1000 users resulting in $50K/yr support contract revenue

Author of a multiplatform Java and Ruby library with 2000 users resulting in $100K/yr support contract revenue

Author of a Java library, got into a fight with the ruby community mostly because I don't know the difference between licenses, copyrights, and patents, and now I've only got 500 users and $25K/yr of revenue

blcknight• 12 years ago

I don't see how his argument holds water, the BSD license is quite permissive, and porting software to another language sounds like a modification to me, assuming you keep all the copyright info intact. He still holds the copyright, but he's granted everyone a worldwide right to use the software with or without modification...

And apparently he doesn't know what the common meaning of "FOSS" even is.

"Metaphone3.java was released as part of the Open Refine Package under the BSD license" and then "It does not, contrary to popular belief, automatically declare the algorithm to be public domain, or the software to be FOSS. "

new299• 12 years ago

If he really does own a patent (http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584 referenced above). Then I can kind of see the argument. He's provided a BSD licensed implementation, but you don't have a license to use the patent. Perhaps that means you can share it, compile it, but if you use it you're in violation of the patent?

It seems rather odd but not totally inconsistent.

Kiro• 12 years ago

I expect to see a Ruby port by the end of this day.

viraptor• 12 years ago

Yeah, he pretty much screams for the Streisand effect to take place there. I expect a number of ports this week just because he says they can't be done.

gear54rus• 12 years ago

Rightfully so, IMO. Would hate to see another idea getting lost and forgotten because of copyright BS.

briandear• 12 years ago

I hope so; it would be really useful.

ris• 12 years ago

Nope. Can't copyright an algorithm. Would have to use patents and software patents are on highly shaky ground.

sysk• 12 years ago

For others wondering what Metaphone is, here's the Wikipedia description:

"Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm, published by Lawrence Philips in 1990, for indexing words by their English pronunciation. It fundamentally improves on the Soundex algorithm by using information about variations and inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation to produce a more accurate encoding, which does a better job of matching words and names which sound similar. As with Soundex, similar sounding words should share the same keys. Metaphone is available as a built-in operator in a number of systems, including later versions of PHP."

Metaphone 3:

"A professional version was released in October 2009, developed by the same author, Lawrence Philips. It is a commercial product but is sold as source code. Metaphone 3 further improves phonetic encoding of words in the English language, non-English words familiar to Americans, and first names and family names commonly found in the United States."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone

SwellJoe2• 12 years ago

It's always surprising how little people understand the licenses they publish their code under. BSD does not make something public domain, but it does allow derivative works and inclusion in completely unrelated projects, without permission of the author. Rewriting it, from scratch, in another language generally completely bypasses even the requirement to reproduce the copyright notice (unless there are data structures being copied over, or similar, that copyright would apply to).

Algorithms are sometimes subject to patents, though I believe they shouldn't be, and if the author wanted this sort of control over the algorithm a patent is the path he should have taken, but as far as I can tell the author has not patented this particular algorithm (and I doubt it is novel, as it sounds similar to quite a few pre-existing tools in related fields).

This is just a sort of weird conversation. Why Open Source something if you don't want people to use it in interesting ways?

bhouston3• 12 years ago

Re-writing the code using the original source as a guide means it is a derivative work if you want to get picky. Changing the programming language doesn't make it non-derivative.

If you want a non-derivative work you need to do something like a clean room implementation where the one writing the code doesn't have access to the code of the existing implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

BTW this guy can not stop derivative works once he has released it as BSD.

chii• 12 years ago

BTW this guy can not stop derivative works once he has released it as BSD.

could he just remove the BSD license from all subsequent commits to the code base? The existing code base will still continue to be BSD licensed of course.

learnstats2• 12 years ago

BTW this guy can not stop derivative works once he has released it as BSD.

Aside: Isn't is possible to revoke a license?

HackinOut2• 12 years ago

Thanks for this. I would be interested to know if, in practice (in a court of law), attempt to show something is derivative work when it's not is a more common instance than when it actually is. How easy (or hard) is it to prove something is a derivative work? (i am especially thinking of 2 pieces of code doing basically the same thing with the same algorithm, no patents)

dalke• 12 years ago

Clean room design is a sufficient but not necessary condition to establish that something is non-derivative. It's possible that enough changes to the source make it non-derivative under copyright law.

As the Wikipedia link you gave says:

Clean room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In NEC Corp. v Intel Corp. (1990), NEC sought declaratory judgment against Intel's charges that NEC's engineers simply copied the microcode of the 8086 processor in their NEC V20 clone. A US judge ruled that while the early, internal revisions of NEC's microcode were indeed a copyright violation, the later one, which actually went into NEC's product, although derived from the former, were sufficiently different that they could be considered free of copyright violations.

As another example, BSD Unix evolved sufficiently away from AT&T Unix that only a couple of files needed to be replace to get away from AT&T's copyright.

Both derive from someone else's works, but that's a different sense of "derivative" than what copyright law cares about.

crististm• 12 years ago

Indeed, the copyright is asserted onto the written work. The algorithms, general idea, etc. are not copyright-able and except for US not even patentable.

steventhedev2• 12 years ago

Apparently, he didn't directly open source it. He approved its inclusion in the Open Refine package. It's pretty obvious that he didn't understand the consequences of releasing his code in a project licensed by BSD. I can understand his frustration, probably because he was told that his conditions were covered under the BSD license. Given that he sells the same code as a commercial product, this was obviously not his intention.

However, he failed to grasp some basic IP concepts, especially wrt US law. Algorithms are not copyrightable, and most are not patentable (especially after Alice v CLS) under US law. However, there is solid precedent for similar systems being eligible for patent protection (soundex, other patents that cite his systems as source material, etc). It does not appear that he applied for this protection at this time.

Moreover, under the modification clause of the 3 clause BSD license he used in his source file, there is a significant amount of commentary suggesting such a rewrite would be permissible under the terms of that license. However, re-licensing it under MIT would on the surface not be permitted.

EDIT: he may have applied for a patent. This could preclude the project from including his system. However, I'm not a patent lawyer, so I don't know how well this would hold up in international implementations (github being a US entity makes this point relatively moot).

http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

sparkie2• 12 years ago

The BSD license does not contain any patent grants, so he can still assert the right over the use of his patent in pretty much anything - the BSD licensed code can still only be used with his permission, since you need both the copyright license and patent license to use it.

When patents are involved, it makes more sense to us a license like the GPL3 or Apache2.0, which also grant licenses for any patents which are covered by the code.

alkimie2• 12 years ago

Patents are territorial.

Unless he applies (has applied at this point) in a particular country, or has a Patent Cooperation Treaty application filed in some country and is pursuing it in a particular country, he is completely out of luck by publishing his algorithm. (And as another commentor mentioned, post-Alice, it's pretty unlikely that a patent applicant will succeed with software patent applications absent some pretty close coupling to something specific about the computer hardware.)

It's amazing to me that so many software developers have no basic grasp of IP--the thing they work so hard to produce. It's not like it's all that difficult: Copyrights protect the expression of an idea; patents protect inventions. This developer seems to think that copyrights protect ideas.

bchociej8• 12 years ago

However, he failed to grasp some basic IP concepts

Indeed. His patent was abandoned, according to the USPTO's PAIR website at [1], after being rejected for non-patentability. Aside from being apparently non-patentable subject matter, the examiner noted that Philips's application was similar to a previously rejected application no. 10/454,261, and rejected the former on the some of the same grounds as the latter.

(I am not a patent lawyer.)

[1] http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

kevinoconnor7• 12 years ago

According to the USPTO, his patent is abandoned after he failed to respond to a non-final rejection back in 2011.

davidw2• 12 years ago

The project ought to rip that code out ASAP (or talk with a lawyer), as the guy does appear to have some kind of patent, doesn't appear to have a good grasp of intellectual property and is acting like a loose cannon. Maybe tomorrow he won't approve of Canadians using his algorithms or banks, or YC startups, or who knows what. Or he could sell the patent to someone who could then go after the users of the open source package.

masklinn4• 12 years ago

Why is he acting like a loose cannon? BSD does not include anything about patents, and he apparently offered a patent grant only in the context of Open Refine.

chrismcb2• 12 years ago

The problem is many people don't understand what "open source" means.

chrisacky• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, the author of the Metaphone code (lphillips) keeps talking about public domain as if that is what is the point of contention. When you license something as BSD you aren't putting the work into the "public domain" (as in the legal meaning) but you are giving a very permissive license to the subject of the license.

My guess is that Google requested use of the Metaphone 3 package, Lawrence perhaps didn't understand the what BSD meant, but was willing for Google to use it in their Google-Refine (now Open Refine) codebase so willfully let them pick the most permissive license.

I'm having a real difficult understanding him from his GitHub comments. It's clear that he never intended his algorithm to be re-useable or modifiable in any way, but if he intends to restrict the future use of his Metaphone 3 code or even prevent a port, he's going to find it impossible....

Lesson learnt... it's clear that a work of this magnitude would have taken thousand plus hours... if you don't intend it to be re-usable, then you shouldn't pick a permissive, open source license such as BSD.

HackinOut2• 12 years ago

It seems to me that lphilips54 is trying to achieve with a license what we would need a patent for. (He speaks of his algorithm)

RexRollman• 12 years ago

Exactly. Copyright doesn't do what he thinks it does.

masklinn4• 12 years ago

Note that he has a patent on metaphone3.

code_duck3• 12 years ago

It's surprising how little understanding the average person has of the 3 major types of IP registration. Most people I know working in creative and artistic fields could not tell you the difference between a copyright, patent and trademark.

rwmj4• 12 years ago

The lesson that I'm taking from this is he should have talked to a lawyer.

charlesdm2• 12 years ago

Indeed.

It also strikes me as odd that someone who creates intellectual rights for a living (i.e. a software developer), as an independent, does not have a basic understanding of copyright law.

I'm not a lawyer, but some basic understanding is at least to be expected. Still, sucks for him though.

andreasvc• 12 years ago

It's an interesting question whether the license is even valid if it is true what you say that he never understood its consequences as you suggest.

imanaccount2472• 12 years ago

if you don't intend it to be re-usable, then you shouldn't pick a permissive, open source license such as BSD.

Any open source license is going to pose the same "problem". If you don't want it to be open source, don't make it open source. Permissive license doesn't even enter into it.

mtrimpe3• 12 years ago

Not really.

Most Atlassian products are "Open Source" in that after purchase you can download their source code.

You are still not allowed to repackage it / modify it and sell derivative products / run multiple instances of it though.

XorNot• 12 years ago

At this point he's daring someone to do it at which point the only question will be who can afford to fight it. But seeing as how algorithms aren't subject to copyright in the first place...

slapresta• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure the algorithm for Metaphone is not theirs, just this particular implementation. Which means there's nothing they can do here.

Morphling• 12 years ago

Am I missing something obvious here? What would change if this piece of software/algorithm was ported to Ruby? I mean Rubyists would get to use it, but what else would change? This whole thing seems very strange, like if someone would create a cure for a disease and give it out for free and tell everyone how it was made but insit that he be the one who injects every single patient personally.

Mahn• 12 years ago

It seems he didn't mean to make it open source, but was asked by the Google/Open Refine team and complied without understanding the implications.

mariuolo2• 12 years ago

I think the author has no clue about copyright law.

If he wanted to legally protect his algorithm he should have patented it and given a licence to use it only with his BSD-licensed implementation.

Still, IANAL.

bjornsing• 12 years ago

Well, for all we know that's exactly what he has done [1]. ;)

1. http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

mariuolo2• 12 years ago

The name seems to match, but then why not mention it?

bchociej8• 12 years ago

Why BSD license it if you don't want others using it? That's the point of the BSD license. "Redistribution is permitted" etc.

facorreia• 12 years ago

The license literally states that redistribution in source form with modification is permitted, provided a few conditions are met.

https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/source/browse/trunk/...

lotyrin• 12 years ago

He also, some months ago, opened an issue on a Python project to implement the algorithm... but with no text or comments. Just a title: "M3"

https://github.com/coolbutuseless/metaphone3/issues/1

lukeredpath2• 12 years ago

I don't have the time to read it and verify but could this be a patent for the algorithm? If so, does it make any difference anyway?

http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

rwmj4• 12 years ago

Interesting that the patent was filed 17 years after initial publication of the algorithm.

networked• 12 years ago

The patent is for Metaphone 3, a new version of the algorithm that was released in October 2009 and improves on the previous ones. The differences are why the Ruby gem, which already has Metaphone and Double Metaphone implemented, got a discussion going about porting Metaphone 3 from Java.

Edit: wording.

mistercow2• 12 years ago

Minor point, but that's actually an application, not a patent. It might be a patent later, but it isn't yet.

pronoiac• 12 years ago

I thought best practice for software developers was to not look at patents?

chippy• 12 years ago

Especially if they are working in the same field. I think so, yes.

arfar• 12 years ago

That patent has actually been abandoned. Can't find any continuations filed on it either. So as far as I can tell, he doesn't have any patents on the algorithm/process

faragon2• 12 years ago

Clean room design, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

mistercow2• 12 years ago

Since it's BSD licensed, you could make a port as a derivative work, and then license that under BSD just fine.

That is, if it weren't for the patent issue. And clean room design doesn't help against patents.

faragon2• 12 years ago

Yes. That's the point.

jacques_chester• 12 years ago

This is why, in matters of law, you should consult a lawyer.

Stuff you remember from TV is not the law.

Half-remembered Slashdot debates are not the law.

The law is the law. It varies from place to place and from year to year. It is large, complicated and subtle because it covers everything humans do, which is a large, complicated and subtle problem domain.

Seriously. If you have a legal question: see a freaking lawyer. A few hundred bucks to change the entire course of your life is a bargain. It's less than some plumbers.

kerkeslager• 12 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, so I won't comment on who is right here, but I will say that if your business model relies on the law, you should have a lawyer on speed-dial.

anu_gupta• 12 years ago

IMO, @threedaymonk has handled this maturely and well.

https://github.com/threedaymonk/text/issues/21#issuecomment-...

"I'm not going to port Metaphone 3 to Ruby, nor am I going to accept or merge any such ports at this time.
Whilst the licensing of the Java code in question clearly and unambiguously permits such a port, @lphilips54's stated intentions for reuse of the code are unclear and contradictory. I can't see that any benefit would come from integrating something that is surrounded by such confusion."

dragontamer• 12 years ago

What is legal to do, and what is moral to do doesn't always match up.

I'm sure they're within their legal right to copy the code if they wanted to. But that wouldn't be the moral thing to do.

TillE• 12 years ago

I don't think there's a clear moral component here, unless someone can demonstrate that the author would suffer actual damage from such a port. It would certainly be a little rude, though.

masklinn4• 12 years ago

I'm sure they're within their legal right to copy the code if they wanted to.

I'm not sure they're within their legal right to do so given metaphone 3 is patented, and the BSD license does not include patent grants, so the patent grant has to be obtained separately from the license.

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

This sounds like a call for the FOSS community to produce a phonetic similarity algorithm that is not encumbered by patents. Metaphone 3 is patent-pending, and the author obviously intends to profit from it.

Porting the code released with BSD license would effectively just be donating the work to a private individual. Be glad that the guy was good enough to warn people ahead of time, instead of submerging a patent submarine and surfacing after someone creates a big payday for him.

The idea itself, to determine phonetic rules from spelling quirks in English, is non-patentable, but the specific rules he formulated may be. Anyone else could spend "thousands of hours" creating their own rules. We already have a few in the public domain, such as the "i before e" rule, where the "ei" in "neighbor and weigh" is phonetically an "a", which implies that "-eigh-" is the spelling pattern, which also holds in "eight" and "neigh".

See? Free head start for FOSS.

bchociej8• 12 years ago

The patent application linked numerous times in this thread is listed as abandoned after being rejected for non-patentability. Type the application or publication number into [1] for details.

[1] http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

Mea culpa for not reading it carefully, then. I jumped right into the claims, to see how involved a non-copyright-infringing implementation would be.

If there's no patent, the poor guy doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.

schoen• 12 years ago

Mark Rosenfelder has a pretty impressive attempt at computerizing English spelling (with a set of rules and their justifications published in human-readable and machine-readable forms).

http://www.zompist.com/spell.html

dewitt• 12 years ago

Before anyone mocks this guy (sadly, partly too late), please try to keep in mind that he (a) does have a reasonable right to what he says he wants (to have some say in what he believes are his inventions), and (b) it's an illustration that the rules of intellectual property and open source are not always clear, even to those following well-established patterns.

While he's inarguably incorrect about quite a number of things, it's always better practice to assume the best of a fellow engineer and treat this as a teaching opportunity, not a cause for pitchforks and belittlement.

The package maintainer, threedaymonk, handled it perfectly, imo, by respecting the desires of the individual and not porting it, and closing the issue out quickly without further escalation. While it may have been technically "right" to copy the code, it wouldn't have been worth the damage it would have caused to the person behind it. Credit for handling a unfortunate situation with grace.

rmc• 12 years ago

(b) it's an illustration that the rules of intellectual property and open source are not always clear, even to those following well-established patterns.

I don't think there is anywhere on the internet that will tell you that you can't copy a BSD licence. How did the original author decide on the BSD?

Tomte2• 12 years ago

The problem seems to be that he didn't really decide.

It's easy to make a quick decision when releasing software that cannot be taken back.

And when you're finally realizing your mistake, you can only resort to what we're seeing here: pleas and threats.

And of course, on the whole huge Internet you will always have people who defy you either for legitimate reasons or just out of spite. So it's practically guaranteed that you end up with war.

I cannot make up my mind whether we should blame him (for being so nonchalant with the license) or Google (for luring him into this trap without properly educating him on the consequences).

mathetic2• 12 years ago

While it may have been technically "right" to copy the code, it wouldn't have been worth the damage it would have caused to the person behind it.

Well, I will play the devil's advocate. If the code is useful to enough people, then there is damage to everyone else who might have benefited the port.

What I understand from his comments is that he does not only not want you to use his implementation but also "his" algorithm as a basis to the port. Now assuming that he has an efficient algorithm to solve the problem, then he basically forbids other people from using the efficient algorithm.

So the needs of the community's damage may in fact be more than the individual's. Also say the exact same thing happened with GNU toolchain, does the individual's damage still outweighs the community's?

I would not bring this up if his tone in his comments wasn't arrogant despite the fact that he is at fault by not reading making any effort to understand the licence.

EDIT: Can down voters care to comment?

acqq3• 12 years ago

If the code is useful to enough people, then there is damage to everyone else who might have benefited the port.

So what? There exist enough codes which are licensed under some kind of "open source" license for which you still have to pay to the patent holder if you actually use the code. While "somebody else" can benefit from using it, he/she still has to pay if the patent holder demands so.

Not every "open source" license is automatically a "GNU" one.

It's not only the moral issue (who benefits) but also the legal one. Even ignoring the legal one, imagine you being in his shoes: you earn money by selling your invention, and for convenience to your clients, you sell them your code. Then somebody asks you to allow him to include your code in some other project which is published under some other "open source license." You agree not knowing what that actually means, for example, because he who asked used misleading language. Later you find out that you misunderstood the effects of that action. Morally, the agreement where one agrees only because he was mislead is certainly not the agreement which has to be enforced. It should be annulled.

lphilips546• 12 years ago

Well, I am sorry to have misunderstood the fact that a BSD license swears away any rights of control. In practice it turns out to be nearly indistinguishable from Public Domain, so what's the point? Let's just call it Public Domain and quit pussyfooting around.

Why the outpouring of hostility and contempt? I'm sure I sounded 'arrogant' - perhaps I was not too pleased with the tone of voice of many of the commenters here either.

Yes, I am perfectly aware of the difference between copyright and patent. What I was not aware of is that the copyright notice required by BSD is useful only in asserting the right of the copyright owner to swear away virtually all of the protections normally granted by a copyright notice. It is a legally castrated copyright.

"then he basically forbids other people from using the efficient algorithm" Did I ever say that I was trying to place any restrictions on the use of Metaphone3.java as is or however you might want to privately re-implement it? I donated the my work in the open refine project and it is there for all to see. I had a notion that by allowing the source code to be made available I was doing something good that would make Open Source advocates happy!

I'm glad you find my work useful enough to make a fuss about. Metaphone 3 is the product of my work alone - all the research and resulting 'rules' and logic were developed by myself from primary source data. Metaphone, Double Metaphone, and Metaphone 3 are not derivative works.

Again, my apologies if I misunderstood your "right" to do whatever you want with my work without restriction. Your method of asserting your rights, however, has certainly done nothing to make me feel welcome in your "community".

metaphorm2• 12 years ago

threedaymonk behaved as a nice, well-intentioned, polite person ought to. however, the copyright claim was completely bogus as was the assertion of control over the algorithm itself.

i think we can all agree that being nice and polite to each other is a good thing, as is respecting the wish's of a fellow engineer out of professional courtesy. we shouldn't be confused about the law though. none of those copyright claims were valid.

alinajaf• 12 years ago

threedaymonk behaved as a nice, well-intentioned, polite person ought to.

I work with threedaymonk and the reason that he came across this way is that he is a remarkably nice, well-intentioned, polite person.

lpsz• 12 years ago

The package maintainer, as you said, handled this very gracefully.

Yeah, the author is likely in the wrong/gray (IANAL). But I can't help but be disappointed that posters below immediately jump to "Well, it should be free anyway!" "Why is he protecting his code?" "Here is an evil oppressor trying to keep something valuable to himself."

Here is a developer who tried to build a living using his own software, something many of us aspire to do. Why are we so quick to throw him under the bus? Is it because we instinctively always want to "defend the underdog"?

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Here is a developer who tried to build a living using his own software, something many of us aspire to do. Why are we so quick to throw him under the bus?

Because he published it under a license he apparently never intended to honor. It's like trying to charge someone for a free sample after they've eaten it.

cbd19842• 12 years ago

The best way to deal with this is to quietly take this person aside and explain to them how this stuff works.

For one, people likely aren't going to be as charitable the second time he does this, and, for two, unless and until he understands what he's doing with licenses, he's a potential land mine to any project he contributes to.

CS courses need more courses on how licensing works, and by "more" I mean "some non-zero number". It's useful to know even if you never enter the FOSS world.

dkuntz2• 12 years ago

I disagree. While knowing what these licenses are, how they work, and some pros and cons of each is nice, it's decidedly not computer science. There's no traditional CS courses I can think of that this would fit in, except for maybe an ethics in CS course, which not all schools have.

nlksnclds3• 12 years ago

assume the best of a fellow engineer

Quit calling yourselves that: you're all web developers, not engineers. At the end of the day, 95% of what people on HN do revolves around making pretty websites for the internet.

You have not taken the FE exam, you did not study engineering, you are not certified as an engineer. This is just the latest way that CS graduates are trying to self aggrandize and de-trivialize their profession.

iN7h33nD• 12 years ago

I would say "making pretty websites" is still engineering because they are working with machines to design and manufacture [0]. This makes anyone who does it an engineer.

I find it rather offensive to generalize everyone on HN into one category. I have read comments from people in all stages of life and many different professions and we do not need this kind of talk.

[0] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/engineering

schlarpc• 12 years ago

There is nothing to stop a software developer from taking the "other disciplines" FE and the "software engineering" PE.

mynameisvlad5• 12 years ago

Unless you are in some specific locations such as Canada, where the term "engineer" is tightly controlled, then you can call yourself whatever the fuck you want. "Software engineer" does not imply any of the things you said in the United States.

I can call myself a software ninja if I wanted to. That doesn't mean I practiced the art of ninjas. I can call myself a code monkey. That doesn't mean I'm actually a monkey. It's just a fucking title, so get over it. If that's my actual title at a company then I'm going to use it publicly too.

Anderkent• 12 years ago

It says Master of Engineering on my diploma, I can call myself an engineer if I want to.

matt_heimer• 12 years ago

If you wanted something like what he wants, are there any licenses that limit the scope of derivatives? Or are you best off using a No Derivatives license with a contact for permission notice?

djur• 12 years ago

Someone could still reimplement the algorithm based on a description. You can't copyright algorithms. You can (sometimes) patent them, which the original author apparently tried to do. The claim would have been based on that patent rather than on copyright.

(Edited some details I was wrong about)

directionless• 12 years ago

I'm a little disappointed to see the original PR locked due to lphilips54's inconsistent statements.

While I think the OSS community should be polite and inclusive, I also think that we are all poorer if we ignore contributions due to author behavior. I'm confident that many authors have abhorrent political views and actions. While we should not elevate them as role models, there are times it's reasonable to just use the code.

thegeomaster• 12 years ago

I think it would be interesting to point out a somehow similar exchange between Richard Stallman and Bruno Haible, the original author of CLISP[1]. Bruno wanted to integrate GNU Readline into the then-proprietary CLISP, but RMS informed him that doing so would be a violation of GPL. After a minor flamewar-of-a-kind, Bruno concurred, because he wanted very much to use Readline, and today the world is richer for another free software Common Lisp implementation. I think it very clearly illustrates how often people don't understand the implications of free software licenses, an issue that, even now when there are loads of FAQs and websites dedicated to just that, remains present.

[1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

gburt• 12 years ago

He is wrong [0] in his interpretation of copyright and the BSD, but I think his wishes for his code should exceed his misunderstanding of the relevant law. Further, I think this is a patent (application?) on M3, which is what he is wanting to say with the "Public Domain" stuff [1].

[0] Though, IANAL.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

ddoolin• 12 years ago

The file in question, for anyone curious:

https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/sr...

matheweis• 12 years ago

It's too bad groklaw isn't still around, it would have been fun to try and get thier take on this.

davorak• 12 years ago

Indeed! I miss groklaw tremendously.

_JamesA_2• 12 years ago

Thirded. Especially with the recent activity.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/19/judge_spanks_sco_in_...

spacemanmatt2• 12 years ago

I miss Groklaw dearly, too.

mbillie1• 12 years ago

All I can think of is this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-...

"They have no right to do this. Open Source does not mean the source is somehow 'open'. That's my code, not theirs. If I make something private, it means that no matter how desperately you need to call it, I should be able to prevent you from doing so, even long after I've gone to the grave."

payne92• 12 years ago

The legal issues here relatively straightforward and were touched on by one comment in the github issue thread.

The Java implementation is protected by copyright.

The algorithm itself would be protected by a patent, which he (generally) could file for within a year of publishing.

And the odds of getting that patent (in the US) would be fairly low, given recent Supreme Court rulings.

plesner• 12 years ago

IANAL but I don't see how using a BSD license automatically makes code FOSS. According to Lawrence Rosen[1] (who IS a lawyer),

"Since courts are likely to construe implied grants of license narrowly, a licensee should consider obtaining separately from the licensor an explicit grant of patent rights that might be needed for modified versions of BSD-licensed software."

This seems to go against the FOSS[2] freedom 2, the right to distribute modified copies without asking anyone for permission. Now, whether that can be applied in this particular case I don't know, I guess that depends on whether there are patents involved. But in general, BSD does not imply FOSS.

[1] http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm, chapter 5, p. 79

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

CrLf• 12 years ago

Oh, the endless arguments of copyright vs. patents.

From my understanding of this, the author has no right to block any reimplementation of the algorithm in another language because he has released the code under a license that explicitly allows for modification (which says nothing that forces modification to be restricted to a single language). The reimplementation just has to keep the same license and copyright notice.

However, there seems to be a patent pending for the algorithm. If there is an actual patent, he has not actually given anyone the right to use the code or any modifications.

You can reimplement it, but you can't run it without the author's permission (i.e. patent grant).

EDIT: On second thought, one might argue that since the code was licensed under BSD (which says "use in source or binary form") by the patent holder himself, he has given an implicit patent grant to everyone that uses it or modifies it in any way.

spacemanmatt2• 12 years ago

Since the SCOTUS decided Alice vs. CLS Bank, I doubt a patent application for an algorithm will get past "pending" state.

cbr• 12 years ago

The patent was abandoned after being rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780445

Animats• 12 years ago

The patent application is worth reading. First, he gets a 101 rejection as unpatentable subject matter, because it's not a "machine or transformation". You can argue against that for things which a computer can do and which could not practically be done by humans. (Even though you can in theory do video compression by hand, at one frame per century or so, it's just not practical. Patents are about utility.) But here, the examiner points out that this algorithm could effectively be done with "paper and pencil". Soundex, its' predecessor, was.

Then the examiner points out prior art - a patent application by Ralston, (App #20040054679, Ralston, James, March 18, 2004, "Remotely invoked metaphonic database searching capability") The original Soundex algorithm dates from 1919, the Metaphone algorithm dates from 1990, and Ralston's improvement is on record. Philips' improvement of 2009 just wasn't enough of an advance over the old stuff.

He might have modified the claims to overcome those objections; this was a non-final rejection, and you're allowed another revision cycle with no additional fees. But, for whatever reason, he abandoned the application.

A rejected patent application puts the algorithm into the public domain. Philips has no rights in the algorithm now.

lphilips546• 12 years ago

By the way, I might add that I am deeply appreciative of the people here who have reviewed this situation with a friendly and understanding response to my attitude.

tripzilch2• 12 years ago

"Public Domain", he keeps using that term, I don't think it means what he thinks it means. It only sort of applies here. Something actually being Public Domain has extremely wide repercussions. A Public Domain work exists without any copyright or intellectual property laws applying to it, none.

For a work to be really Public Domain, only happens under a bunch of specific circumstances that really do not apply here (such as the copyright holder having been dead for a number of years).

You can't really slap a license on something and have it be Public Domain, because that means relinquishing any and all intellectual property rights related to the work. Including personal and moral rights. From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Dedicating_works...

## Dedicating works to the public domain
Few if any legal systems have a process for reliably donating works to the public domain. They may even prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights. An alternative is for copyright holders to issue a licence which irrevocably grants as many rights as possible to the general public, e.g., the CC0 licence from Creative Commons.

Note the last remark about Creative Commons' CC0 license. It's about the closest you can get to actually releasing your work to the Public Domain, worldwide (check the Creative Commons website for info about some legal hurdles why you can't "just release something to the Public Domain"). It's not something that happens by accident.

Now obviously the author doesn't have this particular specific meaning in mind, instead rather something else. Except, it would probably help the discussion a lot of he'd use the proper term and accurately defines what he is trying to say.

It seems to be some kind of confusion or collision between the (obviously and pretty straightforwardly copyrighted/licensed) actual written code he released under the BSD License, and his intellectual property rights over the (more nebulous concept of) the algorithm that is described in this code. I'm not at all sure if you can even obtain copyright over the latter. Actually no, I am pretty sure that you cannot. Copyright is very explicitly defined over a work, not an idea, and the work is the actual written code that was released under the BSD License.

“I am not authorizing you to release a Ruby port of Metaphone 3”

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