{"id":24171,"date":"2019-02-04T16:29:35","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T21:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=24171"},"modified":"2019-02-04T16:29:35","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T21:29:35","slug":"apple-is-indeed-patenting-swift-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/04\/apple-is-indeed-patenting-swift-features\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Is Indeed Patenting Swift Features"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Claburn<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Here are two of the patents in question: 9,952,841<\/a> and 9,329,844<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John McCall<\/a>:<\/p>\n

By licensing its contributions under the Apache license, Apple has granted you a perpetual, royalty-free license to use all of its patents that are necessary in order to use Swift.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Ted Kremenek<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Any company making a contribution to Swift is intentionally licensing implied patents to the project. This is a business decision. Speaking on Apple’s behalf, that business decision is clear and deliberate: we want Swift to be successful and to be used widely. The Apache 2 license provides a form of IP licensing as well as IP protection for the project, and thus its users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Chris Lattner<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I agree with much of the sentiment that software patents are often silly and the system is broken in many ways. This patent is a reasonable example of that (patenting syntactic sugar for monads, really?). I have no idea if there is prior art, but I wouldn’t be surprised. For sake of discussion, lets assume the patent is valid.<\/p>

Even if I and others don’t like it, the software patent system exists. As is pointed out upthread, one of the major reasons that Swift uses the Apache 2 license is to provide more certainty for the community w.r.t. licensing and patents. An additional bonus of the Apache 2 license is that the open source project as a whole benefits<\/em> from companies having and contributing their patents under the terms of the license: to say more directly, it is good<\/em> for the Swift project that Apple has this patent and has contributed it to the project.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This basically says that if someone sues someone else over Swift then they lose access to the patents contributed to the project, and are therefore subject to countersuits. This is a significant part of the protection that the Apache license provides (it is a big deterent to lawsuits in general) but it only has teeth if there are actually patents in play!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Kronopath<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If Apple genuinely intends to use this only for defensive purposes, or as counter-suits against patent trolls, then they should put it under something like Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement, something that legally enforces the idea of only using the patent for defensive purposes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Nathan Gray<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Like most software engineers I’m not qualified to analyze what will or won’t infringe on a specific patent, so I’m not going to make any such claims, but attempting to patent programming language features from Swift is certainly a chilling move by Apple. @Chris_Lattner3, @tkremenek, and other (former\/present) Apple people have emphasized how great this is for the Swift community, but that’s a very limited perspective. What about other languages? What about other communities? Is a new, from-scratch language design that uses optional chaining open to legal attack by Apple?<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Claburn (Hacker News): Here are two of the patents in question: 9,952,841 and 9,329,844. John McCall: By licensing its contributions under the Apache license, Apple has granted you a perpetual, royalty-free license to use all of its patents that are necessary in order to use Swift. Ted Kremenek: Any company making a contribution to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2019-02-04T21:29:39Z","apple_news_api_id":"29d6e628-37fd-411a-b4ea-0a4a25409eed","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2019-02-04T21:29:40Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AKdbmKDf9QRq06gpKJUCe7Q","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[209,991,40,71,901],"class_list":["post-24171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-category","tag-legal","tag-open-source-software","tag-patents","tag-programming","tag-swift-programming-language"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24172,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24171\/revisions\/24172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}