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RAND: "Random and non-discriminatory"

gerloff

Venerdì, 08 Dicembre 2006

Heise.de's usually excellent Stefan Krempl, who does most of their articles on copyright and patents, has sweetened my Friday afternoon with a minor slip.

In an article about various EU folks crying wolf about how the Chinese will eat our lunch if we don't introduce tight patents on really, really everything (ok, I'm exaggerating, but not by much), he expands the acronym "RAND" to:

random and non-discriminatory

Made me smile.

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Commenti

"RAND"?

gerloff

Lunedì, 11 Dicembre 2006

Sorry, I should have clarified that in the entry itself. It means "reasonable and non-discriminatory".

This is often used as shorthand for conditions that may be considered acceptable for copyright or patent licenses, as in "the rigthsholder is obliged to license the technology under RAND terms".

The problem for Free Software is that even license conditions considered "reasonable" for proprietary software usually suffice to make a piece of software non-free. If, for example, the Samba Team was forced to license Microsoft's interface information on "RAND" terms, including a license for every machine running Samba, this would effectively make Samba non-free software.

Therefore, RAND terms may sometimes sound nice, but they're usually incompatible with Free Software.

rand?

chrysn

Venerdì, 08 Dicembre 2006

what is this random abbreviation intended to mean?

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