Alex Schroeder

At work I'm often considered to be the go-to person for questions of software licenses. The latest one was customers wanting to upload HEIC images into the software. And now I know why this format is so unpopular and why Apple makes it the default: It's encumbered by thousands (!) of patents. Which is why you can find a few libraries implementing encoding or decoding of HEIC or HEVC files, but their licenses only cover the copyright, not the patent.

Software patents need to die. I know, it seems we fought and lost this war. But I can still spit on the idea. And I do.

To see how fucked up the situation is, here's why you should not read patents in the first place!

Are you suggesting that it is better for developers and contributors not to read patents? If yes, why?
Yes. Unfortunately, U.S. patent law creates disincentives for searching through patents, even though one of the main justifications given for the patent system is that the patent teaches the public how to practice an invention that might otherwise be secret. Willful infringement subjects the infringer to enhanced damages when they are aware of the patent and intend to infringe, and reading patents increases the probability that subsequent infringement will be found to be willful. Moreover, we find that developers often assume that the patents they discover are broader in scope than they actually are, and thus such developers become overly or needlessly worried. If, despite this, you do intend to conduct a patent search, you should seek legal advice first.
https://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

Example license, BSD 2 Clause License and Third-party patents clause:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openize-com/openize-heic-java/refs/heads/main/LICENSE

Patent licensing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_licensing

Patent licensing terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_license_terms

One of the license pool administrators, showing how many software licenses are involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA

Sometimes people wonder: what’s the plan!? How do we fight the elite suppressing us? In Switzerland, people get to vote a lot. And sadly, the votes rarely go the way I want them to. The problem is my fellow citizens. Just yesterday we talked with some friends and one of them said that they had read about how government is bloated … I said, perhaps that’s due to the newspapers they are reading. My wife started telling stories about the federal government near breaking-point because the parties in the center and on the right have no plan. What went unsaid was the only plan they had was “down with taxes, down with regulations” and then when it all starts failing it isn’t their fault. Like children. Sigh. In any case, this anecdote is supposed to illustrate how much outreach still needs to happen.

The important votes this Sunday: the Swiss votes against further cuts to state media. Yay! Better centrist state media than right-wing media by the billionaires. :party_vomit: and the Swiss voted against a climate fund. We currently spend about 2 billion CHF per year on CO₂ reduction and the fund was supposed to be fed by 0.5% to 1% of GDP, or about 4–8 billion. Nope, they said. No future, they said. Just great. :orc:

The maps of Switzerland are all available online.
https://map.geo.admin.ch/

Notice the option to "Journey through time". 1865 was the when the Dufour map was finished.

There is an app, too.
https://swisstopo.app/

About thee Siegfried map, which came after the Dufour map:
https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/siegfried-map
Visualisation in map.geo.admin.ch
https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/siegfriedmap-jtt-20251008

The Dufour map was a project by the Swiss nation state to constitute a geo-body, which is why all the lands beyond the border are not shown. I am always reminded of this as I read Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. There, it is argued that Siam, caught between the British in Burma and the French in Vietnam was forced to accept that fixed borders on a map are necessary to make treaties with the Europeans and in the process of learning how to map the court also discovered its own colonial ambitions. And so the three big local powers ended up claiming the land based on the maps drawn up, and all the smaller local powers ended up getting absorbed. And as ever, the language of the victors remains to tell the story. Now that you have a map, you can say that Thailand had always been there and had defended itself against the colonial powers when another explanation is that it constituted itself in that moment and before that, there were tiny kingdoms, villages, sometimes paying taxes to both Burma and Siam.

Anyway. Maps area endlessly fascinating.