[windlep]

I remember when I saw a presentation by the macaroon authors a few years back, there were pending patents that Google filed around them. While the authors claimed Google wouldn't sue anyone, I'm always a bit skeptical about such claims. I thought macaroons would be helpful for some of my use-cases, but since I now knew there were patents that'd be wilful infringement so I didn't bother.

I can't find the patents now, so perhaps they were rejected or withdrawn. I had assumed that was why macaroons hadn't caught on more widely.

Edit: Found the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9397990B1/

[tptacek]

There are so many stupid patents out there about everything we could possibly work on, it is actually reassuring to see that Google is assigned to some of them, rather than to some storefront in Marshall, Texas.

[surajrmal]

Google has an open pledge to not litigate open source uses of its patents: https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge

[yencabulator]

Meanwhile, fly.io is not open source. Some of their software is, but not all of it. Same likely holds for the SaaS you're thinking of starting.

[diggan]

What does a "open pledge" like that realistically mean, in case they someday broke that pledge? Would the court-case 100% surely get thrown out? Am I legally protected because of this pledge?

[windlep]

The patents page (https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/) does not include the macaroon patent. Maybe they forgot to update it?

[jimmyl02]

maybe this is similar to google's patenting of dropout for neural networks? you can never know but so far there haven't been many adverse effects and they claim that they patent it so others can't maliciously patent and enforce it.

dropout patent link: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9406017B2/en

[windlep]

That was what the authors claimed when I asked them about the macaroon patent. It'd be nice if Google had a legal document associated with patents they never plan to enforce, or the constraints around when they might enforce them (e.g. only against patent trolls) that a company could rely on.

[everybodyknows]

The Pythonish pseudo-code, rendered to an image (figure 7) -- is that common nowadays? Though the patent I see is dated 2013.