Ten years ago to the day, the first FOSS Patents blog post went live. (In the table of contents on the right side you can also find an entry for January 2010, but that one was added subsequently--and backdated so the contact form would be listed behind all of the actual content.)
When I talk to readers at courthouses or on other occasions, I realize most people don't even know what the "FOSS" stands for. That means Free and Open Source Software, a "politically and philosophically correct" term that describes both persuasions of the same movement. At the outset, the idea was indeed to focus on patent threats and assertions against open-source programs such as Linux. I always viewed the Open Invention Network (OIN) very skeptically as it appeared to part of the problem to a several times greater extent than it was part of the solution. And I was aware of some threats no one had reported on at the time. In fact, there is one that I hadn't written about in the more than 16 years since it was made, but with so much water under the bridge by now--and with Microsoft being a member in good standing of the open-source community these days--I'm going to reveal it on this occasion:
In early 2004, Microsoft's patent licensing department contacted MySQL AB, the originally Finnish-Swedish and, at that time, heavily Americanized open-sourced database company (whose CEO I was advising at the time). What Linux was in comparison to Windows, MySQL was to Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2. The term isn't used much anymore, but back then the "LAMP Stack" meant Linux, the Apache webserver, the MySQL database, and one of the P languages (mostly PHP, with a few people using Perl, or even Python): an open-source technology stack powering more websites than any other comparable configuration. MySQL had risen to popularity alongside Linux. It was a symbiotic relationship. Microsoft, of course, favored Windows + Internet Information Server + SQL Server + Visual Studio (C# or Visual Basic).
What Microsoft--and again, the Microsoft of then is not the Microsoft of now when it comes to these types of issues--told MySQL (a company that had received tens of millions of dollars of venture funding while Microsoft already had roughly 10,000 times greater resources) was that they claimed to hold a patent that covered functionality at the very core of the MySQL database engine. From a software development perspective, a database engine is a relatively monolithic (as opposed to modular) thing. If someone asserted a patent against the basic architecture of your engine, it could mean that you have to almost start all over. You'd lose years.
Microsoft was clear about its demand: a 2% royalty on MySQL's (tiny) sales. Two things were not clear, however: whether Microsoft had an agenda to actually start a patent war against open source and, particularly, the LAMP Stack, so that an initial royalty agreement would not have been an amicable resolution of an IP issue but could have been the beginning of the end for MySQL and LAMP; and Microsoft declined to disclose that mysterious killer patent.
The concern I just outlined--that Microsoft would wage an all-out patent war against open source--was not merely paranoia. A Microsoft exec in charge of corporate strategy at the time had told some Silicon Valley venture investors a year or two before that "if it comes to worst with open source, [they'd] just use some of [their] patents." So what was presented as a shakedown might have been a concealed attempt at a shutdown.
Microsoft was the only company at the time to have an issue with Linux; the rest of the industry viewed Linux as a chance of liberation from Microsoft dominance. When it came to MySQL, however, two other major patent holders--IBM and Oracle--potentially had just the same strategic motivation to attack the successful startup, as those companies were pro-Linux, but faced a disruptive-innovation threat from MySQL. While that would have been a gigantic violation of antitrust law, one of MySQL's founders even feared that Microsoft, IBM and Oracle might have agreed to launch near-simultaneous patent attacks on them. And they had only a very few patents (from a smaller startup they had acquired)--likely of zero retaliatory value.
MySQL didn't accede to Microsoft's demand, and Microsoft never stepped up the pressure or sued. Part of the reason may very well have been (and in my view, most likely has been) that there were two things going on in the EU that Microsoft had to be cautious about. The European Commission going after Microsoft for its conduct in some other conduct; and the EU's legislative bodies (Council and Parliament) were working on a Directive for the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions, i.e., software patents directive. Concerns by the open-source community played an important role in the political debate.
At some point MySQL was seriously considering making Microsoft's patent royalty demand public. We had already prepared a press release, and it was going to be centered around an open letter to EU policy-makers urging them to abolish software patents in Europe (though that wouldn't have solved the problem for MySQL anywhere else, and it actually generated most of its revenues in the U.S. anyway). We didn't escalate the conflict, and ultimately that was better for everyone involved.
Oddly, about five years later Microsoft actually tried to defend MySQL's independence. Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems, which had acquired MySQL the previous year for $1 billion. While Sun wanted MySQL's business to grow, there were reasons to assume Oracle simply wanted to control it so as to eliminate a competitive threat. Microsoft and SAP (even though mostly concerned about Java in the beginning) were the two large complainants, and MySQL's founder, Michael "Monty" Widenius, was the third complainant, with help from me. So MySQL's founder and I ended up in an alliance with Redmond about five years after we had thought Microsoft would potentially use patents to destroy it.
If not for that old Microsoft patent threat against MySQL--16 years under wraps--, I might never have gotten involved with patent policy in the first place. And I had it very much in mind when I launched FOSS Patents. At that time, I already knew that Microsoft wasn't necessarily a foe (as the Oracle-Sun merger review showed). In fact, I felt that some FOSS people, maybe because they received funding from the likes of IBM and Oracle, weren't being fair: they turned a blind eye to some other large tech companies' (especially their financial backers') questionable patent dealings and pro-software-patent lobbying, but even when Microsoft had good intentions in specific areas, they looked at whatever Microsoft did or announced like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifier glass and, if all else failed, simply made up concerns that weren't warranted. Part of the FOSS Patents agenda was to focus more on companies whose patent abuse got less attention, but "deserved" more. The first big story here was the second post ever: on an IBM threat against an open-source mainframe emulator.
This blog's focus evolved dynamically. In fact, just about four weeks before I launched FOSS Patents, Apple had filed its first patent infringement complaint against an Android device maker (HTC). Android became the most heavily-attacked piece of open-source software that year as Oracle sued Google (a case that later became only a copyright dispute as Oracle's patents failed in court), Microsoft sued Motorola, Motorola sued Apple (which countersued using largely the same patents as against HTC), and the following year Apple sued Samsung.
Of the roughly 2,300 FOSS Patents posts I've written to date (also, there were a few guests posts), roughly 63% (1,456 posts) went live in the years 2011-2013, the three years in which the "smartphone patent wars" were raging on a very large scale. By 2014 they had already subsided, and in 2014 various disputes came to a partial or complete end.
With those Android companies countersuing, my litigation reporting simply had a mobile focus (and occasionally even gaming consoles). If I had anticipated that, I'd have named the blog "Mobile Patents" or "Phone Patents."
Actually, "FRAND Patents" would have made even more sense. I already took a clear position against injunctions over standard-essential patents in 2010. And a few years later, a Research In Motion/BlackBerry lawyer accused me, after a Mannheim trial, of having "devalued" SEPs and that companies were cutting back on their standardization activities (obviously not true, as we all know now with the benefit of 2020 hindsight).
More recently, this blog has almost been an "automotive" blog, only because car makers are currently the ones that SEP holders like Nokia primarily seek to prey on.
So there's probably no point in ever renaming a blog, much less when it is as well-known as this one. I'm very grateful for having so many loyal readers, and a number of highly important people in the industry as well as in the judiciary, executive and (to a lesser degree) legislative branches of government. I really am.
There's one thing I had envisioned for the 10th anniversary that I haven't found the time for: a redesign. This blog still uses the "Blogspot" platform's original blog layout. Blogspot became Google's "Blogger" service, and undoubtedly supports more fashionable layouts. However, since I have manually entered and edited all the HTML tags here from the outset, it's a bit risky to switch to a newer layout (I ran a test and the result looked awkward)--I or someone I'd pay for it might have to go over 2,000+ posts and make countless manual adjustments. Nevertheless, it may happen later this year--certainly sometime before the potential 20th anniversary :-)
There were times when I was seriously considering discontinuing this blog, or handing it to some other organization, such as an IP-focused publishing company. But in recent years there have been some really exciting developments--and I've found a way to keep blogging while continuing to run an app development company (I'll have a new game to announce this summer).
Some of you encouraged me to keep going--even some who have rather different positions on SEPs or on patent policy in general. Thanks for that, too. I'll keep sharing my honest observations and opinions with all of you for quite some more time!
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