 Kiitos kaikille, minusta on 15-11 ja voimme puhua. Kiitos kaikille, että tulemme täältä. Tämä on ympäristö. Täällä on paljon ihmisiä. Mä haluan myös kiitos Janne Kalliolla siksi EXOVE, joka miettiin täällä. Täällä olen todella ympäristö. Täällä on tärkeää puhetta. Täällä olen tärkeää puhetta. Täällä olen ympäristö. Ympäristö ja ympäristö. Täällä olen tärkeää puhetta. Täällä on tärkeää puhetta. Olen kysyä, onkin on onnistunut, miten se taisi olla alueella. Olen soil analysointi, adventure, proto-apurit. Mennään tämän tillsä. Olen oikein ennen jäänyt tämän samanlaisten, josta olen myöskin tämän. Tämä on minun ensimmäinen kokemuksena. Olen todella ympäri, miten tämän samanlaisten ja kokemuksena on. Olen tullut paljon ympäristöjä, jota olen tullut järjestelmällä. Olin tullut kyllä 10 vuotta, As a consultant, maybe the first project I consulted was MySQL database. Back then there was no company even for that project. Late 1990s. I had my own companies as well. I've done database applications, music streaming services. The latest company I'm having for the last almost five years already is called Tuxera. This talk is not an advertisement of Tuxera in any way. What I do in this company is not related to Drupal also, but it's a software company. We do five system software, Linux system software based on open source, and now we are doing it in a commercial fashion. We have to also in our company, Tuxera, we have to deal with GPL and patents every day. We have to figure out how can we use this licensing and patent stuff as our benefit, not as the limit for our business. Many things I talk about today may not exactly apply in your context and your situation, and you hope understand that I'm coming from a different background, but also hopefully I can offer you some new perspectives. Okay, let's start. That was the disclaimer. There's two part of my presentation. First is kind of the challenges part, and then there's the opportunities part. Challenges. What challenges you have with GPL and patents? Here you have it. GPL license version 2, section 2B. You probably all have heard about this. Maybe some of you have even read this part from the license. The wording is a little bit different GPL version 3, but the principle is the same. It's called copy left. You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in hollow and part contest or is derived from the program, or any part thereof. Do the license as a whole at no charts, free of charts, do all third parties under the terms of the license. What does this mean? Can you do software business anymore? Of course if you develop a website, you know, but most likely it doesn't affect you. You are not doing traditional software. However, if you think about the possible business models and possible things you could do, for example with the Drupal, this certainly does affect what you can do if you want to make a business out of what you do. You can start just, you know, close source Drupal, make some extension and start selling the whole thing. It's against GPL. You have to dig a little bit deeper and figure out how to get away from this limitation, if this is a limitation for your business. But this is a really important part. It's the key part of GPL license, and it affects everybody working with GPL software, including everybody working with Drupal. One more thing I'd like to say about this GPL versus 3. I understand Drupal is licensed with GPL version 2 or later, so you can choose if you want to have GPL version 2 or version 3, if you have the choice or you need to make a choice in some context. How I see licensing in this, let's say IT industry in general, many companies have internal policies against GPL version 3. It's not good for them. Many companies today and I believe in the future. I don't think GPL version 3 has been a great success from a business perspective. For many communities and community developers, it's probably very much good and okay, but let's say the big businesses have been very careful in adopting GPL version 3. So if you have a customer asking what version of GPL this thing has been licensed with, you make a local installation for your customer, most likely you should answer GPL version 2 if you don't know what to answer. That's at least what I would say. GPL version 3 can be seen as a trade. Another major challenge. Here is one patent document retrieved from a European patent database. There's a lot of patents. You have probably heard about them, read about them online and maybe sometimes even bumped your patent claim or patent thread. This particular patent, there's millions of them. You can see the number somewhere, application number. It comes in millions these days. Tens of millions these days. Data filing, 94 long time ago. Common names base for long and short file names. This is one of those almost legendary FAT file system patents. This is a really valuable patent. This patent has been litigated many times in course. It has been found valid. Microsoft has been litigating against a lot of these Android phone manufacturers based on this patent. And they have been successful. There's a lot of patents like that in very many different areas of IT. You can browse the patent databases, commentaries on them and a lot of blogs write about these patents. You should be aware that patents exist. And sometimes they may actually bump into what you are doing. A little bit about what we do in our company is that we are actually working in this particle file system context and these kind of patents are really important for our business. We have to take care about these patents. The good news is that you can work still even if patents do exist. You just have to contact the patent owner and figure something out. One more thing about these patents is that there's been this ongoing debate in Europe about software patents and especially many community developers have been thinking that patents don't exist in Europe. But this is not true. It absolutely is not true. Basically the same patents that are valid in the US have been also successfully litigated in European course. This is one example of this FAT patent. This is exactly the same patent registered in the United States and in Europe, litigated in the United States and in Europe and successfully enforced in both places. Okay, one more challenge ahead. Maybe you have patents ahead if you do business and become successful. Oh, there's a lot of text here. This is what GPL says about patents. But this might be also relevant. From GPL version 2. The main point here is that you know the couple of principles. You can't charge anything and you have to be able to distribute it for everybody. If there are patents, GPL version 2 says. GPL version 3 goes even a little bit further. GPL version 2 says you can't distribute the software anymore if there are patents which are out there and somebody has royalties for those. If as a consequence, even somebody alleges patent infringement, conditions are imposed on you, somebody has royalties, that contradict the conditions in this GPL license, meaning totally free redistribution, somebody has patent royalties, they do not excuse you from GPL. And as a consequence, you may not distribute the program, this GPL program at all. Somebody comes out and says, hey, Drupal infringes, 10 of our patents. They are here. We have royalties for this. Does it mean your Drupal business is over? You read this text. Maybe this is a valid concern. Maybe it's a valid concern. Just one example here. A company that... And there are many of these that just go boldly where they want to go to. Has anybody here heard of this YOLLA company? All the fins have heard, but okay, I understand that not many other guys have heard about it. So back in the day, there was this company called Nokia in Finland, and they were developing a Linux-based operating system for their phones called MIGO. They canceled it a couple of years ago, switched to Microsoft Windows, and now their whole business has been sold to Microsoft. But when they were still strong, they developed a Linux-based operating system. And so that, and the guys who were developing it found their own company called YOLLA. And actually now they plan to publish the first YOLLA phone end of this year. So just the company out of the blue, couple of guys, they want to start selling a new mobile phone based on a new Linux-based platform. This is a bold move if you think how many patents you have in telecommunications sector and how many patents you have affecting phones. So just think about all these Android lawsuits out there. Okay, well again a lot of text here. Some of the news releases I just found online and copied here. This guy, Hurmo, I don't think he actually is anymore the CEO, but he wants to see you at some point of the company and he says that, hey, this YOLLA Linux-based phone, we're going to sell it to everybody all over the world. It's a very good choice for manufacturers if you want to brand it as your own phone, because we are not affected of these patents. We are based on an independent operating system, doesn't influence patents. Do you think this is a strong ground they are getting forward with? I don't think this statement is actually so strong. Most of these Android patents, they are about the internal functions of the operating system. I think this YOLLA operating system most likely influences most of the same patents that are part of the Android lawsuits. Of course, there are some UI patents they don't probably influence, but there are many others they could. Just that you manufacture a phone, you have to license a lot of patents for creatures, LTE and other standards. On a more positive note, the thing, the other quotation here, is from one of the famous peer-to-peer lawsuits and judgment from the United States, and there the judge is asking, you can generalize that to all kind of IT businesses. All right, somebody starts a very interesting new technology company. Necessarily you have to influence a lot of third-party rights, patents or whatever. In this case, there was a massive corporate infringement ongoing. Basically the guy started the peer-to-peer network. But the judge is asking, hey, our society needs new companies. We need new businesses. It looks like necessarily you do influence a lot of rights when you start an innovative company. How much time you get to grow big enough so you can start paying out? I think that's a valid question. That's the right approach. And I actually think the approach these guys are having in this Finnish company, the mobile phone company. I like that attitude. Maybe they know the patents exist. They don't exactly know where they apply to. Let's just go ahead. They see what happens. I think that's the way we should start thinking about these difficult corporate and patent questions. And that brings me to the opportunity part. So how do you deal with GPL and patents? Let's start with this GPL. So there was this issue that how can you build a business based on GPL that makes everything free, free of charge? Different ways to look at this. But I think the most obvious answer how GPL doesn't affect your business is you just build some kind of cloud service. And my understanding is that there are very many companies also here making business out of Drupal this way. It's based on what the GPL language here says that, okay, you must cause any work that blah blah blah, distribute or publish. Those are the keywords. Distribute or publish. You have to actually distribute your software to somebody else. But as long as the software is in your own hands or only at the hands of your customer hosted somewhere, it's not distributed or published in the way GPL says about this thing. And at that point you haven't distributed it. You are not under the GPL terms that you should give it free of charge to everybody. So just host the code, modify it as much as you want, and sell access to your service. Sell access to your website, whatever it is. Make an online component that can be integrated with other sites. If it's online, HTTP, you're very fine. That's not distribution. And of course it's a big trend in computing. GPL doesn't affect this cloud service business in any way. I think this is the biggest cloud business today. I'm not sure about it, but my belief and gut feeling is that this must be one of the biggest businesses. These guys are working exactly under GPL. This limitation here. I think this Amazon web services is pretty much based on Linux. Pretty much based on open source components. You can buy from them today pretty much everything. Computing power, operating system, platform, components over the cloud. Even individual software component access. Everything through access fees. That's fine. It's just on Amazon servers, not locally hosted. You don't get the software into your own servers. You will never get it because of GPL. They have been modifying the Linux and all the components so much. They will never want to distribute those further. They will keep them. That's their competitive advantage. I think this is a very valid model. Cloud is a big trend. You see it pretty much everywhere. You just have to figure out how can you make a service that can start competing with, for example, what these guys do or what these guys can do today. Well, that's a tall order. That's a tall order. I understand this Drupal community. There's also a lot of other kind of access and cloud-based services, running and growing fast. Here's another part. I understand this is much more controversial than the first one. Component licensing. You look at the GPL. It says you have to give your software free of charge to everybody if it in whole or in part contains or is derived from according to GPL version 2. Okay. This is something you have to read very carefully. What has happened in many other contexts? I understand maybe not in the Drupal context, at this point is that there's an active component market, for example, on Linux. Linux is GPL version 2 license. There's many commercial components and apps running on Linux. So in principle, reading the GPL, don't think Drupal yet, you could develop plugins, apps, rewrite the whole platform or part of it, make commercial extension and license those. Close source proprietary charging money for that, the third parties. I think GPL allows that. In many other context, it has been determined, it's very fine. You can then do your licensing business there. You can do the Microsoft model here, Oracle model. That scales. It's a very good business model, true, tried, tested. Actually in our company, Tuxera, we use pretty much this model. We do components for Linux. We charge for those like we do for any kind of software. Another way to try to train your position, if you're in a component business, is to try to figure out if you can patent something for your component. Then you have even stronger arguments that this GPL cannot apply to my component. I have a patent for it. Let's keep this GPL part and the component part, which is under patents as separate. That's the idea and principle here. If I go to the Drupal Oracle website and check the licensing section there, I can see that this particular community has a little bit different approach to commercial extensions, modules, plugins, themes, however you call them. If I write a model or theme, do I have to license under GPL? There were some other questions in a similar fashion. Can I write a bridge that I can then have a commercial component plugged into Drupal? Can I build this kind of commercial API interface? The answer is always the same. It has to be under GPL. Forget about commercial licensing in this context. This is what they say. Drupal modules and themes or plugins, whatever they were, bridge components are derivative work of Drupal. The GPL on code applies to code that interacts with that code. Now they are talking about these modules and extensions. If the modular extension interacts with the main Drupal code, that's enough. You have to be under GPL. Keep putting your own module or theme. Therefore, GPL applies to any pieces that directly interact with parts of Drupal that are under the GPL. When I was checking these CMS systems, content management systems, I found that, for example, WordPress has a little bit different approach. There were websites where you can buy commercial WordPress components. I actually remember when we built a website for this current company that I'm having, we did license some WordPress components for that website. But for Drupal, at least if you look at what is said in this license FAQ, this is very much against the community norms here. Do you know who has written this text? Does anybody know? Where does this come from? Richard Stolman. Richard Stolman? I don't think so. This is from Drupal.org. Who is writing this Drupal.org? This is a text. No idea. Because what I was left wondering is that this kind of text must serve the purpose of somebody and the goals of somebody. Now, if you look at what the GPL said, it said that in whole or in part contains or is derived from. This is legal language. It links you to the concept of derivative works, which is a concept in copyright law. That concept has been clarified in a number of legal cases. How the Drupal community FAQ interprets this text is that GPL applies to anything that interacts. Interaction I think is much more broad than being something that is derived from, contains. Contains basically means you copy code. If you copy GPL code and copy paste it as part of your own program, then you are derived, then you must be under GPL. But if you just interact without copying any code, this goes a couple more steps further. I don't think this kind of interpretation, at least it's not based on copyright law. It's based on something else. I think it's based on somebody in the community having this approach like you said Ritsa Stolman is having. Ritsa Stolman wants to build free society. He hates proprietary software. He wants to read the law in a way that there is no proprietary software out there. He doesn't care what the writing interpretation of the law is. He's like, okay, I don't want to say what Ritsa Stolman is, but let's say the ideology behind this kind of language is more like pro life. While the way it should be read is like pro choice, you can choose. So I don't know who has written that, but I think it goes further than copyright law. Now, what does it mean in practice? I think there's been like a long time already, but a couple last years many, for example, mobile platforms have become really successful because they have been able to build ecosystem around the platform. And by ecosystem a very key component has been enabling kind of commercial app development. In other context you have this iTunes app store, Google Play, a lot of games there and all kind of crappy apps, but also like functionality, utilities, and even extensions to the platform. It's very important you have this kind of app stores. Community here, okay, run by a company, different thing. Enables, helps people to develop apps. Everybody can make money out of those. While in this Drupal community, I see kind of very negative approach to these kind of apps. I don't understand why. If this community thinks that, you know, it's this GPO lies on a problem, then I think the community should themselves build some kind of commercial API so that they can commercially extend Drupal. I think it would be good for the whole community. Or maybe I have understood something wrong here, but this is a concern I was having. I didn't fully understand why this community is so negative against the commercial extensions. Is there somebody here who can clarify this thing? So that's the power of the Drupal, right, that everybody can debug issues and contribute. Yeah, I fully understand. Power that is open, but what if somebody wants to, you know, make the module commercial, what does this community have against this guy? I think it still like makes the community kind of stronger. An example is Linux community. There's a lot of commercial extensions to the Linux kernel. And for example, Linux Turvas has always said that he's like an open hybrid. He's totally like, he has no moral points here. And it's okay. You can extend it in GPL way or even commercial way. You just keep the arms length and follow the GPL. But this community, whoever wrote this guideline, seems to be more in the lines of Ritza Stolman. Yeah, I fully believe that the communities must be then different between WordPress community and Drupal. And part of the reason I think it's rooted in this kind of language than answer the FAQ and yeah, it's a different community. And I guess one of the answers to somebody who wants to develop a commercial extension to go to WordPress community. Maybe you're in the wrong context. Yeah, I fully agree with you. I fully agree that this interaction does not part of copyright. Nobody should have a valid claim even if you extend it commercial. I'm just wondering why somebody wants you to think that it's a problem. What's wrong with this community? Definitely not. I think what has been thought about here is that you actually write locally hosted code, component, PHP code or something. Yeah, okay, if you think really broadly. I don't think the guy who wrote this can't think like any online accessible components or stuff over. You interface with HTTP would be under this language. I don't think they think that broadly. But okay, you can actually read it like that. Yes, if you just read the text and think yourself. Hey, this would need some clarification. That's at least my conclusion here. Yeah, so what's wrong with this approach? I don't see anything wrong here. I think this would strengthen the community if there would be an app store on top of the platform. Maybe somebody can take an initiative. I fully agree with you. So why there is no app store? Why there is this language on the website? Oh, it's a mistake. Oh, okay. Okay, maybe. I don't think it's a mistake. I think it's a very carefully thought thing. It's exactly according to what Stolman thinks. That was just my observation. I was left wondering what this whole thing is about. Obviously, the guilty ones are not in this room. They would have been definitely a good defense for the language. Okay. So what business models are left here? Always you can do projects. I understand this is the main business model in this community. GPL has nothing to do when you're selling hours and projects. You develop the website for a customer. You do custom work. That's very fine. And if you distribute the code to your customer, then if you do any changes according to GPL, you have to release the code if somebody comes after you and asks about the code. The challenge with this model is that does it scale. The companies I see in this community is a very large community. Maybe one of the most active open source communities today is that many of the companies in this community, commercial whatever projects you have here are quite small scale still today. Probably because the business model is not scalable. If you sell projects, it doesn't scale well. Here is how it scales. You need to have a lot of people to work on these projects. And there are already companies like, I don't know, IBM, Gap Gemini here, Accenture other consultancy companies. They have these cubicles. You go to India. It's like this picture 100 times China, same thing. There's a lot of people out there. They can do very cheap consultancy work. If this grows bigger, I think the guys who have the cubicles already have the advantage. So that's the challenge with this model. Not GPL, but how does it scale? Okay, you can run your small shop. Scale it to 5, 10, 20, 50 people, no problem. Have your local market, but to scale it really big, that's the challenge. I think it's really hard to build a new Microsoft here or even new MySQL here. That's really hard. I understand Drupal Founders company could be one of the biggest, but still that one is not like at least at this point, not another Microsoft. That was a part of GPL. Then a couple more points about patents. Maybe I already touched on this topic. There's a lot of patents and the more you read about them, the more you can become concerned about patents. You can find a patent that your project looks like applies to exactly what you are doing. You can hear about these patent lawsuits, threatening stories, sad stories about what happened when you got a patent lawsuit or even a patent threat, but at the end of the day, do you personally know somebody else? For example, in this community who have received even a threat of patent infringement. Is there somebody in this room that has heard about this kind of patent threat? Anybody? You have heard? Okay. There you go. Was it in this context? No, it was not in Drupal community. Okay. The important thing about this patent is that as long as you are in a community of companies with 50 people or less, this is not the community on context where you litigate patents or even threat with patent claims anybody. There's a lot of talk, but it's cheap. You can always hear about these patents and there's a lot of online forums and threads where people are talking about patents and thinking how bad they are and how harmful they are for society. You can't develop software anymore. But at the end of the day, I don't think there's anybody who knows about patents too much. There's too much talk about them. On to everything they do and if you can convince them that this is lower risk than something else, then they basically are able to pay you more and I think anything open source is very good for that because generally open source solutions are not litigated against because it creates so much bad will that large corporations Yeah, thanks, that's a very good follow up comment on this. I was thinking this from the perspective that if you want to start your shop and develop your own software should you be concerned about patents and my answer is no. But yes, if you're going to sell your software to some very large company that works internationally in many markets, especially in the United States, those companies always look at their risk position including potential and whenever they buy something that costs a lot of money or even that is relevant for their business it doesn't cost so much. They always ask, so is there potential we infringe somebody's patents and they want from their supplier to sign some kind of agreement where they indemnify this big company. Basically you sell them an insurance as part of the delivery. Usually free of charge, you can charge more you have to insure them. The best of our knowledge, there's no patents but if there are, I pay the cost for litigation. Just, you know, read them all. And the thing is that the amount, the thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of patent attorneys that you would need to litigate against like a 50-person company is just huge in the present. But that doesn't mean that like in 50 years from now in 100 years from now that we won't have that technological ability and if we do so then we're effectively killing innovation because like you can only do stuff that is like 20 years behind which is the average lifespan of a patent. That's my first thing and the other one is much broader which is like patents are supposed to be for tangible goods that can have to be like made industrially and I just don't see how software patents even fit that and it seems odd that there are software patents at all for me so that's why I was so curious about to hear your take on that. Well, my take is very practical. First of all, like the latter part of your question is very good point and it's the philosophical point that can first of all software be patented. It's a very, very valid question and I think many people would answer negative. No, you shouldn't be able to patent software. However, my perspective is practical and I can see software is patented that is not going away. There will be more software patents so from practical perspective that question is not relevant actually. It's a philosophical question you can ask over beer. The first part of your point was the distant future that I'll be building this kind of wrong kind of society. It was also, I understand a bit, so it's another question. Fifty years from now you are in a different position but hey, we are living today and right. So I also had this kind of my perspective is very short-sighted maybe here. Maybe I'm wrong. We don't use Troopas, sorry about it. Yes. Yeah, we have gone a bit a lot. Like listening to this session it was almost like how do we exploit open source to further our commercial interests is the feeling that I'm getting from the session. How do we use patents to to protect our components from GPL etc. It seems to me to run entirely contrary to the spirit of open source and to the spirit of open source. I understand where you come from and I like to come back to this how I phrase these words that the community like how you describe it is pro life. The principle is really the important thing. I think that's this ingenio stripping the morale of the source was a good move for businesses of course because like you were saying it made a patent palatable to them. But I don't think there's anything essentially wrong with having a certain level of models and ethics in what we do. That shouldn't be incompatible with commercial. I think that creates the kind of commercial world that we live in today which isn't entirely always invested. I think that you are now putting your own morals and ethics that we all should follow those instead of that if I want to exploit open source I should be free to do so if the license allows it. If the license is wrong, if the society is wrong then you go vote and change things. But if the community expels me that's the price that I have to pay but we should not stop talking about these things because if somebody thinks that they are unethical because they are still valid things in the sense of the current laws and that's the point. That's why it's good to hear I invited Mikko here that we hear something else than the echo chamber that we hear something that we don't like. Yeah, but anyhow it's more that there are different ways to build the community like WordPress, like the Apple has the communities some don't make money whether it's sort of pro money or pro what it would be pro code in a sense or something else. Those are choices that we have made in the community but at least for me it's refreshing to hear that there are different options and different ways to move forward and if somebody thinks that they are exploit somebody else might be said this is just really lucrative business. All right, I'll just wrap up but I understand this kind of talk I'm controversial, yes I understand I'm in a hostile territory at least some of you might think like him I fully appreciate your points I'd like to be a better person myself and a politician I'm not a chees unfortunately I'm a CEO, I'm a business guy I think I'm a close part into Microsoft also my thinking has been influenced by Microsoft pattern that turns a lot in the recent years that's where I come from that's what I am Anyway about these patterns and litigation what's happening today my main argument was here that if you are doing a small shop based on you know Drupal opens or CMS most of the pattern stop doesn't affect you they are the big guys like Microsoft and others in consumer electronic space they are litigating a lot of patterns and those if you call them patent warheads they are not actually targeted at innovation they are targeted at money at deep pockets and another point here is what these patterns actually cover my approach is that the patterns are there, they exist they are not going away no matter what we do one part of my history was that I founded an organization called Electronic Frontier Finland a part of this kind of similar than EFF in Finland that was like 12 years ago I went to the parliament I advocated against patterns I went to the European parliament I was there with Ritsa Stolman the same panel advocating against patterns 10 years ago I found out this doesn't work we never win this war I gave up, I went to do this business and what I'm thinking like looking at these patterns and talking with these pattern attorneys from the speaker companies is that actually the kind of area of valid strong patterns is very narrow they are almost always well known the same patterns I'll indicate is time and again like these fat 5 system patterns which is a kind of strong pattern but you can almost like list those areas and almost list the patterns that are valid and good you can think there's many patterns in media code as MP3, good example everybody knows about the MP3 pattern and many other code are patented DRM digital restriction management to use free software guide terminology 5 system storage technologies compression security algorithms those areas have strong patterns and you should be concerned about them but then again there are many areas where the patterns are really weak and I think this content management system in general user interface related stuff is an area of weak patterns there are also something called registered design patterns in the United States registered design rights in Europe you can try to get an accuracy right for your user interface and functionality there but these are not strong patterns it means that you can circumvent them pretty easily good example is this one just one example it's a pattern I think both in United States registered design in Europe filed and registered is still valid but most likely it is but can you circumvent that I think many people here can figure out quite quickly some other way to you know do the same functionality what is registered here is exactly this kind of mechanism and this kind of graphics and this kind of stuff and there are many similar stuff Apple basically these days they register every kind of screenshot from iPhone the you know opening screen all the icons they are registered designs you can exactly copy them but if you think you can circumvent this you can have another mechanism you know how Android phone opens there's all kind of stuff you can do there to make it open not just this kind of slide to unlock and that's totally fine this is a weak pattern a weak design right final point about patterns I understand this might be controversial to some of you what if you think in different way about these patterns and design rights this means you step you know to the different side of the table you think about could we acquire our own you know strong registered rights here compared to this litigation which is really expensive and only the big companies are doing that actually smaller shops can file patterns and you can register your designs with relatively modest cost like 10, 20,000 you can have a pattern if you have very good strong patterns and designs I think your company can be more valuable if you're looking for getting investment if you're looking to sell your your company if you have a company with patterns or registered design is always more valuable than a company without any any strong IP and okay having that kind of rights I want to repeat this thing it doesn't mean you're going against the community you can decide what you do with your registered designs or your patterns you can license them free of charge for the community you can try to get money from other companies you can try the approach when you are trying to develop commercial extensions don't mix with TPL version 3 that's problematic with patterns though use TPL version 2 but that's one approach and you know if you limit your mind to this kind of free software thinking you don't even consider this option but if you free your mind if you think pro choice here's one approach you can take okay there are many companies like that I just found this website that lists patent valuations I'm not sure myself how successful or how important this company is but the data looks good okay somebody's chatting to me same time these guys list some of the recent mergers and acquisitions where patterns were important in the merger and acquisition actually this is a pure patent patent purchases here and they are just counting the value of a patent and they are all technology transactions in general about the software or hardware flash memory, inkjet printing, data transaction e-commerce, document management average value of a patent is more than 200,000 it's not bad you have 5 patents, your company value just went up 1 million if those are okay patents I don't think patents are evil they exist this is the final slide reference to the earlier slide where you started finding gold and then you get the mine I don't know if you get the true patents or what way you get it but this is of course the goal you want to reach okay thank you if you have any more questions you are free to go ahead discusses the importance of patents in driving technological breakthroughs and supporting the innovation of many patents but you were just talking about strong patents and weak patents right and I think that here no one is against strong patents stuff like new algorithms things that you know are important and are real breakthroughs but now something that you described as a weak patent in my views they shouldn't be accepted at all by the institutes because they just drive confusion they expose many many people who are doing honest work to like possible patent infringement and possible even bankruptcy you might say that it doesn't happen very often that some big companies use a small guy but that's mostly because of PR so it's not really a valid reason in my book so what's your thought on the amount of weak patents that are emerging just so big companies can try to get to other companies big pockets as you have put it yeah I fully you know support your idea that weak patents should be somehow you know driven out of existence but I don't know how to do that the patent system seems to be very liberal and you know patent offices allow a lot of weak and bad patents that's definitely a problem and I think everybody agrees you should yourself be careful if you invest in patent don't file those bad patents well that's a really difficult difficult question and I don't have an answer to that one there's a lot of talk about that in the there's many proposals have been made and I don't know how to fix the system really it's difficult to fix but that's a difficult area yeah as a husband of this one so the part of the issue is that the US PTO is really lacks on certain things does not have competent people is getting better but allows a lot of lot of crap through it and the US model of litigation that they are going into the court is also a bit toxic in that sense ways how you can describe a simple solution for a simple problem that everybody can figure out that this is how it goes can be masqueraded to a complex language that you don't actually understand it and then you when you go to the lawsuits then the it comes problem and then the final thing that I see part of the problem that when you when you start to you make patents with engineers you have engineers talking about these things the patent examiner is engineer the UI engineer the patent attorney in certain countries engineer some other countries is a technical lawyer but when you start to litigate then you drop all of these to the background and the lawyers talk and they and the court they might even understand what the patent is at the end but how simple or how complex thing is it so the system is broken but nobody has the power to fix it so we just have to leave it sir you had a comment just a single question if you could go back in time and talk to Tim Bernersley and tell him everything that you told us and patents all of this work where would we be today I would not recommend him the patent anything why not? he is doing infrastructure stuff that should be free of all IP free then we should build closed things on top of the open work that other people do is that your model don't think like that are you okay with commerce and linux applications we had them for the truly innovative stuff we wouldn't be sitting I fully agree with that one I want all infrastructure stuff really deep level stuff to be free that's definitely what it should be web must be free there's no doubt on that okay okay how I would see this the state must provide us the roads but cars must be private that's how I see it but if we pay tax it doesn't mean I have free access to any car I want I can't have the keys to the car sorry about it so I think that there's a good case in Bluetooth back in the 95 when it was invited invented by Ericsson in Sweden they made business calculation that they will earn more if they will give li Poppy for free but they did patent it and they just say that okay we have patented it probably they kinda did what we did että se on patenteellinen, mutta se on käytännössä kaikille. Mennäänkään, että hän on järjestelmä, että heillä on hyvä paikka, että kaikki on vain, että heillä on paljon pieniä, jotka pitävät tärkeää, mutta ihmisiä, kuten meillä, pitävät tärkeää. Jotenkin, voitte tehdä patenteella myös, että okei, ei ole mitään tärkeää, koska me olemme tärkeää kaikille. Joten voitte tärkeää, mutta Ericsson ei ole mitään, että Ericsson oli ei olemmoinen innovatio, että okei, käytä sitä, mutta heillä on tärkeää, että me olemme yhä enemmän, jos kaikille useita käytetään myös, ja heillä on tärkeää, että jos heillä on, ja en tiedä, että hän onko tärkeää, että heillä on tärkeää, että heillä ei ole mitään eri eri Ericsson, että heillä on tosiaan tärkeää, koska me olemme tärkeää, että jotenkin, että heille on aivan, että jos hän tekee tärkeää järjestelää jälkeen, niin se on tärkeää, että jos tekee eri eri eri eri, ja hän ei ole mitään tärkeää, ja että se on tullut suomalaiset domain, niin the world would have been different, because they would be saying that, okay, your invention actually inferences that this worldwide web happened, and you can't mitigate it, because you have licensed the worldwide web from Tim Berners-Lee first. So it would be different. And it could have been better, but we don't know. Probably wouldn't have been that big success that Tim Berners-Lee would have licensed for everybody, but using web is 10 bucks. But the web is also so important, because it's free, free as in freedom, right? So if it wasn't free, then it wouldn't be so widespread and so universal as it is today. That's for sure. I would actually criticize that comment slightly, because there are fundamental infrastructures, things that are for free, like IP or web, and there are some things that are paid for, like most wireless access networks, 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, CDMA, you name it. And they're also widespread. Yeah, they're widespread, but they're not universal. CD was real fair. Because there's competition. Automatically, there's competition, so they can't be universal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there will be competition if there's a price tag. Yeah, of course. But it could be still a really big thing. Yeah, yeah, of course. No one needs questions. Okay, thank you very much for your attention. I think we can close this talk now. Thank you.