One of the reasons my city decided to go with LoRawan is exactly because it’s less complicated from the legal side of things. It’s much more complicated to work with, however, and because of Danish telecom laws any such tech comes with ridiculous restrictions that give telecom a sort of monopoly on high speed “internet”. This would also apply to threads though.
Anyway, one of the advantages a city gets is that it has a lot of locations to set up antennas. A public school, a library and so on, are all good locations that local citizens wouldn’t have access to. So the trick is to get your city to open up their LoRawan equivalent to the public. At least if you want to deploy things all over the city. Luckily mine does. It also gives you free access to power supplies if your project is benefiting the city (and open), and they are often interested in supporting you financially as well.
> if you’re a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally
Is this really true? I assume the licensing legalese means patents, and patents don't apply to private tinkering unless there's commerce involved.
More generally aside from hobby scope - The absurdity of the monopolies granted by the current patent regime are made obvious by this arrangement: Big companies that have patent portfolios to countersue with can use OpenThread freely, small businesses and startups can't.
(Obviously it still sucks and is a major chilling effect)
While you’re unlikely to be sued for something you do in your basement that has no broader commercial or cultural impact, it’s not impossible. There is no private use exemption to patents.
As always with laws this is very location specific. In germany there is a very clear clause about patents not applying to "Actions carried out in the private sphere for non-commercial purposes" (§11 PatG, own translation)
"I'm in Europe so I don't have to care because software patents are not enforceable here" isn't the solution. Yes, patent law doesn't apply - but copyright law does, and they very much can take down content that references the spec just based on copyright law alone.
(Also I'd think copyright in EU doesn't normally apply to implementing protocols as it's supposed to grant monopolies of creative expression? but IANAL)
So "private tinkering" where you implement something patented in order to perform research is permitted, but not for one's own benefit, even privately. For the example we're discussing, implementing Thread on some IoT device in order to benchmark it in various ways is in-bounds, but you can't use that device to your own benefit, even privately in your own home.
Aye. And, as the sibling post points out, demonstrating that your benchmarking project qualifies for a Research Exemption could devolve into a lawyer-up situation.
Something surprising that a couple lawyers have drilled into me: you can be sued for anything, regardless of whether it's illegal or not. The lawsuit is the discovery & decision process by which the courts decide whether your personal circumstances make it illegal. If the law is blatantly on your side you can get the lawsuit thrown out, but you still have to defend yourself, which includes the expense of hiring a lawyer.
A corollary (and probably what the lawyers were getting at): not making yourself a target is more valuable than actually following the law. If you have money, keep it to yourself - some more unscrupulous actors will find some legal grey area you're operating in and sue you for it simply so they can force a settlement and get some of it. If you're doing something interesting (whether it's legal or not), keep it to yourself. If your interests are not aligned with someone else, gosh darnit, don't tell them or otherwise bring yourself to their attention. There is probably some lawsuit they can bring that would at least force an expensive court case and legal defense and make you want to settle to make it all go away.
And once you are a target anyway, follow the law scrupulously. This is why big corporations invest billions in legal & compliance departments.
The quoted part above is about shipping products too, so I don't understand why they are using that as an example about not being able to play around with something or write blog posts. Here's the FAQ question
> What Would Prevent A Company From Shipping A Product Based On OpenThread Without Joining The Thread Group?
> If developers choose not to join Thread Group and ship products using Thread technology, they are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology, and may subject themselves to legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees.
It feels like even sharing my designs run a major risk of landing me in trouble. This sounds catastrophically hostile to open source in general.
If I ever want to make use of what I've built in any even remotely commercial setting, everything I've built feels liable to be infected & polluted with this copyright. I could rip out Threads & still not feel safe. I definitely can't sell a couple copies of this cool thing to other hobbyists on indiegogo.
The terms of use essentially outlaw community. Yes, maybe hobbyists can play with this, but they cannot form communities, they cannot share wisdom, they can't sell boards to each other, they can't even talk about the protocol or spec on detail.
So yeah, hobbyists arent expressly forbidden. But having any community of hobbyists seems fraught with difficulties. You can only hobbyist by yourself, discussing with no one.
Also, I don't think it helps to use this word "hobbyists".
The entire world runs on free open source software written by unpaid
volunteers who are poorly supported, isolated, and exploited by mega
tech corporations that are parasitical on their work.
"hobbyists" sounds demeaning, It makes it sound like the great
under-structure of common coding is somehow less-than-serious, somehow
outside some commercial ecosystem rather than the very soil and food
that sustains it.
This (self) perception needs to change. Big Tech would die tomorrow
without the "hobbyists" it depends on.
> Yes, maybe hobbyists can play with this, but they cannot form communities, they cannot share wisdom, they can't sell boards to each other, they can't even talk about the protocol or spec on detail.
But it just says you can't ship products and talking isn't shipping a product. The only part I see there is what if you sell things built on it.
Like sure it could be more open and sure having some small business exemption would be good but that's not the same as not being allowed to just make some stuff and talk about it.
Lawyers have little issue defining blogs like mine as "with commercial interest". I have a side-business, so lawyers could make the argument that I use my blog as advertising. I have a Ko-Fi link in the bottom of one specific site, that's a commercial interest, too.
Unless your blog is "I'm sharing holiday photos and nothing else", there's a lot of instances where it could be define as an outlet with commercial interests.
And, ultimately, I have no desire to spend any time and money on fighting even completely invalid claims. I'd rather spend my time watching cat videos on YouTube instead.
But their licensing doesn't care about commercial interests or lack of there of.
It only reserves right to charge you if you ship a product. And by product they most obviously mean a device and by ship they obviously mean sell (or gift, or possibly rent) to some customers.
All of this sounds like a thunderstorm in a glass of water by people who read too many software licenses.
It's because people read more than one sentence and the very next one is:
"Failure to maintain active Thread Group membership while shipping Thread technology may result in legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees."
Which specifically mentions legal action in reaction to shipping only.
"Membership in Thread Group is necessary to ..." is just a statement of their wishes.
It's like "Sleeping is necessary for good health". It doesn't mean we'll sue you, if you don't sleep.
You're talking to the question, but the answer is even more conservative & scary than the question posed,
> are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology,
Under this, it sounds like one isn't even allowed to dabble with Thread without $7.5k/year membership. You aren't allowed to practice is the words they respond with, which seems far more constraining than shipping.
Re-quoting the licensing agreement requires to download the spec,
> view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
> are not conferred the IP rights required to practice and ship Thread technology,
> Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications.
So yeah, actually it seems like even doing hobbyist things by yourself & telling no one is still far more than Thread group allows.
Fuck Thread! It's just so unbelievably shitty having the connected device technologies of our world be un-practiceable by mere mortals.
Not conferred the rights to practice and ship, but if there's something which doesn't require such rights (such are private home tinkering) then not having rights conferred isn't an issue.
Not saying that forgives this abysmal licensing regime of course.
As a software engineer, our confidence that and means "both of these things" is high. I feel like you're taking quite a gamble doing that in law.
Anyone posting to a blog might also be regarded as shipping.
You're also focusing on one gotcha while ignoring the other terrifying clauses here. Are you still using the spec for internal purposes if you are talking about it?
IANAL but I strongly recommend any hobbyists or open source people steer the hell clear. These are terms for no engagement other than those willing to pay the anual fee.
That if you are a corporation that wants to use this tech in your products (devices) you are advised to join Thread Group as soon as possible because you'll be required to do that when you ship stuff anyways. Possibly compelled by court if you resist.
They probably didn't expect interest from singular hobbyists, let alone hobbyists reading what they put out in the most uncharitable fashion. They have some clarifying to do if they decide that they care.
You are ignoring "practice", which in this context means any kind of operational use, including things like research (they also specify "implementation" separately, to explicitly cover development of products).
Practice here is as in "practice medicine", not "practice for tryouts".
> "practice" here probably means use in your business of manufacturing devices
"probably"?
It's a legal document that lists the things you may not do as vaguely and as broad as possible, and lists suing you as the first recourse in their remediation.
It's unwise to err on the side of "allowed" instead of erring on the side of "disallowed".
It's unwise to err on either side. The license doesn't contain phrase "you do not blog about Thread or we'll sue you". Because that's not what they meant, because it's ridiculous.
There's only a singular threat in the license is here: "Failure to maintain active Thread Group membership while shipping Thread technology may result in legal action, including but not limited to licensing fees."
It specifically mentions "specifications" too, and I did quote that bit in a previous comment that you replied to, so I know you read it.
How are we supposed to interpret "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."
You are specifically, in the license, forbidden from implementing, practicing or shipping the SPECIFICATIONS.
You literally cannot transfer any material or content that reveals the specifications.
Their intention for specifications are clearly stated in the earlier part of the document:
Thread Group [...] grants you [...] license [...] to view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
[...] you shall not: 1) loan, rent, lease, sublicense, sell, or permit others to use the Specification; 2) modify, adapt, translate, or otherwise change the Specification in any manner or create any derivative work of the Specification;
[...] copy or reproduce the Specification except for backup or archival purposes in connection with your internal use; or 4) remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Specification.
So yeah, you can't create derivative works from these specifications. Is a blog post about it a derivative work? Who knows. Probably not. Probably what they meant is you just can't create your own Threads 2.0 specification or create unauthorized translation of it (which although restrictive is reasonable because they just don't trust you to not mess things up). They clearly just want to remain the single source of truth for Thread specification on the net, to avoid ecosystem fragmentation and they intend to sustain themselves from licensing fees from commercial device manufacturers.
Even with all their conditions normal rights to citation, critique, parody probably apply.
Then don't use this or teach it. Don't build for it. Isolate it. Let
it die. Cut off its supply. Make it irrelevant. Exclude it from
connectivity options by default, out of caution. It seems pointless to
complain that you can't have a bite of the poison fruit.
But also make sure others know. Actively warn and discourage other
developers away from that technology. Make "Threads" regret their lack
of openness.
The problem is that individuals cannot cut it out, because big tech firms use it pretty widely. It's basically a moat that allows companies to ship products using a shared standard, but makes it impossible for individual developers to (especially ones who aren't actively trying to start a business, but even then, $7500 a year is a lot for a garage-level startup for a technical standard).
Imagine how much less innovation there would be if it cost $7,500 a year to write anything that uses the Internet Protocol suite of standards.
I don't like to make predictions, but I think it will all eventually
be swept away by forced open interoperability that is coming in strong
from Europe. I don't feel any loss for independent developers who feel
excluded from proprietary, locked "markets". It's saving them from
wasting time. Let's check-in again on this situation in a couple of
years. I'll bet "threads" is not even on the map. In the long game it
always pays to go with the most free, open and interoperable
standards, even if it limits opportunities in the short term.
> so I don't understand why they are using that as an example about not being able to play around with something or write blog posts.
It's seems pretty clear-cut to me:
Q: What Would Prevent A Company From Shipping A Product Based On OpenThread Without Joining The Thread Group?
A: (roughly) You will be sued
Now, what does the word "product" in "Shipping a product based on OpenThread" mean?
A product is any (or some combination of) the following:
1. A devkit
2. A book
3. A blog post
4. Any hardware that uses Thread
So, yeah, you can't write a tutorial for using Thread, or make a doorbell for your mum's house, or tell your friend how to read the protocol, or start up a /r/thread community to help each other use it.
Looks pretty damned locked down to me, without at least the FRAND loopholes.
> There's no way that a book or blog post breaches any patents.
What does that have to do with anything? They don't say "we will sue you if you use our patents", they say "we will sue you if you use our specification".
Why would the license matter in cases where your actions aren't restricted by patent law and you don't need to accept any license and any limitations in it?
If you have a valid patent for e.g "A Device or Appparatus that does FooBar", you get certain exclusive rights for just that - that device is the "patented invention" where making/using/selling one is an infringement of the patent, but the description of that device (for example, the patent text itself) is not. A book about doing FooBar isn't a device that does FooBar, and neither is a tutorial or a blog post - the description of the patent is public, the knowledge in it is public, and you're legally allowed to redistribute that knowledge.
However, using the "patented invention" is an infringement[1], with no exceptions, so if the reader of that book or blog post would like to follow it and actually implement the patented method or follow the patented process in the privacy of their home, that would technically be a violation even if they are unlikely to be sued as the patent holder won't find out about it.
[1] 35 U.S.C. 271 Infringement of patent. (a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
>Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.[1] The Thread protocol specification is available at no cost; however, this requires agreement and continued adherence to an End-User License Agreement (EULA), which states that "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."[2]
Given how much R&D expense Thread Group members have invested over the years developing its IP and the commercial value developers get from building on it, compared to, say, Apple's iOS APIs that developers can build on, it's interesting to consider the proportionality of Thread's annual licensing (USD 7500) being 75x Apple's dev license (USD 100).
Either one of these is expensive or one of these is cheap.
Well, Apple’s R&D expenses are amortised over a lot more developers paying their Apple tax.
Most specialist stuff is like this. For example, Braille displays and equipment for blind people is outrageously expensive compared to most consumer electronics. But the price tag makes sense because of how few units they sell. So it takes a higher markup on each unit to make money. Solidworks is simpler and more expensive than Windows because it has orders of magnitude fewer users.
the solution to your false dilemma is that they are both unconscionably high, and additionally they are both unconscionable because you are at the mercy of the vendor
> Either one of these is expensive or one of these is cheap.
I'm unable to downvote this insane take so you get an angry reply instead.
This is the dumbest thing I've read today^1. Charging someone to use knowledge and understanding is insane. Here let me teach you how to do this, now if you ever do anything like this, fuck you pay me? What?!
Both charges are insane. The thread group could sell hardware implementations, or software libraries, that's an ethical way to fund Apple does sell access to it's platform. The extra fees for IP, what essentially is just understanding and know how is so stupid. And society would benefit greatly if everyone stopped pretending like thought crimes were convictable.
^1: which sounds meaningful until account that I've been up for 30m max
Price transparency aside, do we really know if it’s a lot of work to ask them to waive the annual fee, or to provide a no-cost hobbies license? Why do we all assume that they intend to screw the little guy, and aren’t just a small under-resourced group who either hasn’t gotten around to hobby licenses, or hasn’t even realized it’s a thing that people want?
Edit: Kudos to the author for actually reaching out to them. I do wonder what he means by “ask for clarification”… This sounds like the kind of email I dread receiving… vague, open ended, gotta call the lawyer? Did he just ask if they could waive the fee?
> I contacted the Thread Group’s support email address on 2024-04-19 to request clarification on non-commercial Thread use.
The second one to their press team sounds super presumptuous, sorry for that, but I found that you kinda have to talk to press teams in that way if you want to get /any/ response at al.
Thanks for being so open and sharing this. I truly hope that this is an oversight on their part and not something intentional, and we're just looking for the right person who can "press the button" and grant you a license.
Looking at https://www.threadgroup.org/thread-group, it seems like they already have some access for free ("Academic" and "Associate"). I'll have to review your blog post to see if you already reviewed those and what the specific issues were.
Edit: I see you did mention their "Implementor" membership level, but I'm not sure which of thier points you need to "implement their IP" that the no-cost memberships lack... "Access to IP rights", maybe?
> Q: Is membership in the Thread Group alone, at any membership level, sufficient to gain and receive royalty-free intellectual property rights (IPR) for Thread technology? A: No, membership at any level is not sufficient to gain and receive royalty-free intellectual property rights (IPR) for Thread technology.
and an Associate membership does not apply because I am not white-labeling or rebranding existing products.
Correct, and the intent is for genuine devices to refuse to work with "fake" ones. All certificates are registered on a blockchain for validation, of course.
Do these license terms apply if you use OpenThread directly without ever agreeing to the license on the Thread specification? I don’t see how you could be sued if you never agreed to anything except the BSD license lol
The BSD license just selectively releases the copyright on the openthread code. It doesn’t affect other legal constructs, like patents or copyrights outside the repo.
The 3-Clause BSD doesn't NOT release copyright. The copyright holder extends you a perpetual license to redistribute and modify the copyrighted work, provided you adhere to the license. They still hold the copyright. Without them holding the copyright, the 3 clauses would be meaningless, since they'd have no way to enforce them.
Releasing the license is commonly refereed to as "public domain", but it's not actually possible to relinquish the copyright in all territories, and therefore people generally prefer some kind of license.
OpenThread is by Google, and not the thread group. Google has released their copyright claims with the BSD license, but the thread group could still C&D you for copyright issues I.e., that your project that includes openthread code violates their spec’s copyright.
> OpenThread is by Google, and not the thread group.
Wow. So Google is in the Thread Group, and so is licensed to practice and ship the technology; which they do, in the form of OpenThread, under a permissive licence.
BUT anyone that uses OpenThread for anything at all is exposed to legal action unless they cough up the fees. Is that right?
So this is hard for me to understand: Google's OpenThread code is open to be inspected, and you can contribute to it, under a BSD-like licence; but Thread Group holds the IP, and reserves the right to sue. As always, the patents covering it are not listed, and some of them might be submarines. I don't see why it's called "Open" Thread, if you probably can't even use the library without a Thread Group licence.
I'm sure Thread Group would love to stop Google making OpenThread available, but unless they want to tee-off against Google's legal team over patent infringement, the easier route for them is just threatening everyone else out of using it.
All the combined wealth of every individual who has ever wanted to tinker with Thread is a fraction of Google's warchest.
> I'm sure Thread Group would love to stop Google making OpenThread available
Google is a founding member of the Thread Group. OpenThread exists publicly because it's the only widely available implementation that's shipped in a lot of places. Nordic's SDK, for example, uses OpenThread.
OpenThread is built by and for members of the Thread Group, and used by them. It's fairly clear that Google doesn't care much about anyone else.
> OpenThread code is open to be inspected, and you can contribute to it, under a BSD-like licence; but Thread Group holds the IP, and reserves the right to sue. As always, the patents covering it are not listed, and some of them might be submarines
Sounds like they are trying to have their cake and eat it? Release code on a copy left license to try and gain open source contributions, but also force people to pay if they want to use it by crippling it with patents and some weird licensing BS.
Except no one outside of large corporations already paying for it are going to ever contribute code... how could they, you can't contribute code in a vacuum.
It's not a copyleft licence, it's a modified BSD-style licence. Basically, you can do what you like with it, except (a) delete or replace the licence, and (b) trade on the names of Open Group or it's developers.
> crippling it with patents and some weird licensing BS.
Not to mention that part of the lock-in is that certified implementations MUST validate a certificate from a peer, which MUST have been issued by Thread Group, and they will only issue one to a licensee. That is, it literally won't work unless the implementor has a licence.
I had never heard of Thread until just now... and I wish I still had not heard of it. Seriously, I don't need more reasons to be angry at the world. And I was having such a good day to boot!
Seriously though, I agree with the other poster who suggested just avoiding this as much as possible and hope it dies off. I definitely wouldn't encourage anyone to actually embrace or adopt this. :-(
A cleanroom process is evidence that you reimplemented without copying, but that's not enough to avoid infringing a patent. You need to redesign to avoid doing anything they claimed, convince the patent office that they made a mistake in granting some or all of the claims, hold a war chest of patents you could counter-sue with, or YOLO: https://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
Yes. What I meant about valid patents is that you can’t really know what a patent is worth until you challenge it. There are SO MANY filed patents which are basically just crap, nothing more than camouflage and bluster.
Well, Google lost against Oracle too, so it appears a mere API specification can be closed down arbitrarily; than is the world we live in. Unless the US gets a lot more tech literate and open minded judges and officials, I doubt that will change for the better. And, looking at their presidential candidates… well.
The court decided the opposite--that APIs are copyrightable. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Google's usage was fair use, so I would agree that Google mostly won. The Supreme Court didn't consider whether APIs are copyrightable (the lower court ruled that) because Google would win regardless because it was fair use.
So I'm not sure it matters much whether APIs are copyrightable when what Google did was ruled fair use. I'd prefer if the courts ruled APIs weren't copyrightable, but I think it was still a good result because doing what Google did probably covers about any use case anyway.
I wonder if making a device which uses Threads could be considered fair use in the same way, because implementing threads is required for interoperability with many devices.
The Federal Court took up the appeal from Alsup case, accepted Oracles arguments that copying headers & using then same variable makes made the Java reimplementation a copyright violation (incompetent losers), sent the question of fair use back to a jury trial, the jury decided yeah it was fair use, the Federal Court ignored the jury and decided to ignore everyone hollering at them that they were being idiots & ruled for Oracle anyways.
Then the Supreme Court ignored the copyrightability aspects & ruled for a Google on some fair use grounds.
I've skimmed the write up from the ever excellent always recommendable Mark Lemley, Interfaces and Interoperability After Google v. Oracle, and really hope I can go a bit deeper into the history & trial at some point. Section 2 The Long Saga of Google v. Oracle starts on page 27 of the inner pdf. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3898154
It's been incredibly disappointing watching courts like the Federal Circuit be so unable to handle even basic technical matters with even an iota of comprehension, having them bungle up things so badly in the face of so much easy to rely on precedent. Being sweet talked by Oracle's lawyers into believing a header file is anything greater than interface definiton is either incompetence, or some really vicious pro-business hellworld shit.
Governments have no problem allowing de facto specifications to be closed. 5G is heavily patent protected, for example. MPEG is heavily patent protected.
Typically patents "essential" for a standard are licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms. But you do still have to go and pay for the license (sometimes from all the individual companies that have patents, sometimes from a consortium that represents the entire patent pool for a standard).
(I've also been playing around with Thread this week, as it happens. Surprised how easy it was to flash the example project to an ESP32 and start pinging it from my laptop)
I'm also not familiar with this legalese stuff, however in the case of Bluetooth, it has been "illegally" implemented in many (mostly imported from far east) devices that use it but don't show its complete name. If you encounter a Bluetooth device that claims "BT version x" compatibility and not Bluetooth version X, then it might be one of them.
This makes me think that should Thread gain some traction among users, cheap clones implementing it under a similar name, yet without any licensing, would appear shortly on sale at the usual vendors.
Prediction: the world will move on and probably choose something less wrapped up in a legal Trojan. Although not IP based, LoRa is pretty neat. Slow, but so easy to play around with
"Slow" meaning what exactly? There is going to be a delay between pushing the button on my phone and the lights turning off? Or is it more a "theoretical" slow that doesn't matter too much in practice?
The maximum bandwidth for LoRa is 27 kbps. That is shared with everyone in 5mi range. Home automation doesn't use much bandwidth but enough users will saturate the channel.
LoRa is perfect for sensor networks that it was designed for, and good for mesh messaging as long as it stays niche.
I wouldn't use anything called Thread regardless of its qualifications and pedigree, because I don't want to face months and years of meetings in which people will be be forever heard explaining whether they are talking about operating system scheduler threads, or the framework by that name. (Imagine non-native English speakers who don't distinguish plurals like "threads" and "thread" talking to other such speakers). Just kill me now.
> if you’re a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join
> the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally - the license does
> not include an exception for non-commercial uses.
Well, in this situation, and assuming Thread is technically worthwhile - perhaps people would start using it "illegally" (with or without quotes). If such use is wide enough, it might get effectively legalized, albeit gradually.
Don't worry, the protocol is explicitly designed to prevent it from interacting with "fake" devices. Your device needs to present a special cryptographic certificate in order to work properly.
Pirate adoption just helps cement thread as the winner in the IoT space. Which forces organizations in the IoT space to use thread. And they are afraid of being sued, so will follow Thread rules.
So tactically I think this actually plays against making it effectively legalized.
I wonder if that's true. I mean, think of what happened with DVD copying: Supposedly, everyone bought into a DRM-laden scheme; but it got circumvented into eventual irrelevance, will all-region readers pretty much the norm after some point.
But - it's not impossible that what you're describing is what will end up happening. Question is - is there a worthwhile alternative?
> If you’re like me and want to write a series of blog posts about how Thread works, there’s also no legal way.
I feel like their conditions are refering to manufacturing and delivering products that use Thread tecg to some third party (selling, gifting, possibly renting). Not about teaching, publishing or experimenting. As long as you don't transfer what you've built to another person you should be fine.
> Thread Group, Inc. […] hereby grants you a […] license […] to view, download, save, reproduce and use the Specification solely for your own internal purposes
uses the term "internal purposes" which doesn't seem to include writing a blog post for the external world to see.
I have not read the fine print of all of this so my idea here may be dead in the water but...
What if we (the community) were to establish an entity that would pay the licensing for whatever required level and pitch in a small amount each towards the fees and we could all then be legal?
Essentially the new entity would be licensed and we all would be licensed unter the entity. Fractionating the larger dollar figure across us all.
Besides what Terretta wrote... why would we? This seems like such a hostile approach to releasing a protocol that I wouldn't want to support them financially.
Especially when our use cases are something like "make a home-made coffee bean counter last 90 days on battery power instead of 55".
> I have not read the fine print of all of this so my idea here may be dead in the water...
Many commercial software patent licensing agreements for at least the last twenty years (the timeframe I've noticed contracts tend to have realized open source and networks are a thing) have clauses that specifically prevent or limit this, called "preemptive sublicensing restrictions":
In the "fine print" of the Thread agreements including IP agreement -- reading not very closely and while commenting here -- they ensure this a little obliquely:
In the various agreements they've defined Implementor as what you need to, well, implement it, and it does allow sublicensing to affiliates, but separates out Participants and Associates from Affiliates, and puts a high bar on what can be an Affiliate.
Based on the provided definition of "Affiliate" in the context of the Thread Group, Inc. Implementer Participation Agreement, an Implementer cannot simply sign agreements with third parties to make them "Affiliates" in order to sublicense the Implementer's license. According to the definition, an "Affiliate" must be a corporation, company, or other entity that either owns or controls the Implementer, is owned or controlled by the Implementer, or is under common control with the Implementer, with a significant threshold of more than fifty percent ownership or control.
This means that the relationship defining an entity as an Affiliate is based on substantial ownership or control rather than merely contractual agreements. An Implementer would need to have a majority ownership or control over another entity for that entity to qualify as an Affiliate and thereby enjoy the rights and privileges, including any sublicensing rights, granted under the Implementer's license. This ensures that Affiliates are closely tied to the primary Participant, maintaining a direct and substantial connection rather than a loose contractual relationship.
// IANAL, YMMV, ask your attorney, standard disclaimers apply
I'm a little confused, I thought Thread was exclusively based on open standards, like 6LowPAN, that already existed before Thread. How can a licence be required for those? I understand the application layer Matter is new (although also using open standards like CoAP) and might not be that open.
Just be thankful they did this upfront, instead of at the tail end of a painful evolution from an open-source effort to closed-source commercial product, complete with a fig-leaf GitHub with all the interesting bits removed, and a graveyard of abandoned forks. They saved you all that disappointment.
It is kind of relevant, we have zigbee. Which is a bit quirky, along comes Thread that promises to make it more open, better compatibility between vendors and more modern. If it turns out that big companies use Thread in a way to oppose those goals then I feel that is an attempt to enshittify the entire home-automation ecosystem.
Which must be the holy grail of enshittification, I mean it is one thing to make your own product/service worse. But to make everyones products worse? Jackpot!
Let’s hope the result is that the 2030s are known as the decade when consumers, users of apps, figured out it was worth paying for software from honest developers or companies, rather than getting it for free temporarily and then getting their data used in unexpected ways, enshittification, etc.
A large fraction, if not most, of potential users of software in the world can simply not afford paying any non-trivial amounts of money (by US/European figuring) for software of any kind; they simply don't have such money to spare. Look at median incomes in different countries:
Country-specific pricing is not a new thing, though. After all, if someone in a developing country paid for a smartphone they might be able to also pay for some apps.
Also, you don’t make any money advertising to poor people in poor countries. I imagine if they don’t have money in their wallets, their data isn't worth much either. (Well, except to OpenAI).
My point is that "free software supported by data harvesting and advertising" isn't more profitable in poor countries than software you buy off the shelf. Advertising revenue scales down just as much as disposable income for apps.
Have you tried watching a cricket match in India? The ad frequency is incredible. It’s usually essentially a long series of ads with a bit of cricket mixed in.
If advertising were lucrative, it probably wouldn’t be that way.
This tickles my spidey sense. Real tech is what we can't use or teach, that Neo lived for in the Matrix, stuff like: Tor Browser, BitTorrent, pre-Microsoft Skype, WebRTC, Bitcoin, etc etc etc. It's anything that lets the mind seek the truth uninhibited to get closer to the divine.
The tech purgatory we live in today between utopia and dystopia is mostly walled gardens and surveillance capitalism. We pay a fortune for 5G and streaming services that technically have no reason to exist. It would be borderline trivial to develop real p2p networking for smartphones that self-organizes with others near them to share some fraction of their bandwidth and create a darknet. Like BitTorrent, performance would increase with the number of peers, so it would run faster at a festival for example, not slower. Which means that a gigabit radio would fully saturate and we'd be enjoying internet speeds perhaps 10-1000 times faster than we have now, even millions of times faster when the protocol runs on wired networks. Maybe something like Thread would facilitate the creation of a p2p network running on and alongside existing infrastructure.
I believe that this free p2p network should have been developed around 2007 when the iPhone and Facebook exploded, but greed took us into this alternate timeline where expenses rise faster than wages so we never have the time, money or resources to escape the rat race long enough to get the real work done that gets us closer to a Star Trek UBI economy and self-actualization. Meanwhile there are countless Mark Zuckerbergs, 1000 billionaires and millions of tech influencers who have won the internet lottery but don't pursue the goals that I'm talking about here. They just seem to build out ever more infrastructure to expand their wealth, creating a black hole that shrinks the wealth of the working class. I can only think of a handful of benefactors like MacKenzie Scott who might do it in reverse and seek out eager minds to offer them what they need to work at the pace they're capable of outside the status quo.
Which brings me to my point: the legalese obfuscating the Thread protocol isn't to protect their working group, but to prevent the disruption of the status quo in order to protect the fortunes of the biggest tech companies.
The thing is, we're crossing thresholds now where I don't think a lot of people under 50 expect the future to get better. They're waiting to have children because they don't have enough money. Children are dying in proxy wars and we can't even call out the political party responsible because the other one is scarier. We're facing enormous geopolitical threats like the rise of authoritarianism and we can't even call it out because we depend on products made by child labor in those same countries, created using minerals and fossil fuels which only exist there. I mean this is like, really serious stuff. If we want to actually invent the real innovation that heals the world and improves the quality of life for everyone, it starts with the most fundamental disruptive tech like this.
Anyway, one of the advantages a city gets is that it has a lot of locations to set up antennas. A public school, a library and so on, are all good locations that local citizens wouldn’t have access to. So the trick is to get your city to open up their LoRawan equivalent to the public. At least if you want to deploy things all over the city. Luckily mine does. It also gives you free access to power supplies if your project is benefiting the city (and open), and they are often interested in supporting you financially as well.
But as a whole, just don’t use threads.