Tug of war between engineers and lawyers
by Junko Yoshida - EETimes, May. 05, 2015 –
MADISON, Wis. - How do you tell ISC License from Apache 2.0? Why is a Patent Non-Assertion Pledge necessary? Since when are "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" (RAND) terms no longer sufficient?
First thing you do, go to the Intellectual Property (IP) policy page of open collaborative projects such as Qualcomm-led AllSeen Alliance and Intel-led Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC).
But don’t expect a simple answer. The two competing groups, both built around the Internet of Things, provide respective IP policies, sufficiently different but similarly full of legalese. They’re confusing and complicated enough to make anyone shrug and say: "Who cares? I’m just an engineer."
Hold that thought for a moment.