Google's patents and Tensorflow

[Marko Rajković]

Does the Apache license enables developers to use the Tensorflow library to build and use deep neural networks legally using Google's patents (Dropout and BatchNormalization)?

[Dave Ward]

That's more of a question for your legal team, but generally r/machinelearning has seen these patents as defensive patents protecting google from patent trolls. Again, talk to your legal team, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice :) 

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 3:30 AM Marko Rajković <marko.r...@barrage.net> wrote:

Does the Apache license enables developers to use the Tensorflow library to build and use deep neural networks legally using Google's patents (Dropout and BatchNormalization)?

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[Marko Rajković]

Thank You for Your response. I am also familiar with these statements, but what I want is to be sure does Apache license give right to users to build simple neural network that contains layers such as Dropout and Batch normalization. 

[Levi McClenny]

The software is open-source, you are allowed to use it. OSS is considered commercial and free to use for any application, including business applications. On your end you need to make sure that you verify the vulnerabilities, etc. But many, many companies use Tensorflow for a profit, to include dropout and batchnorm. That's why they're included in the package in the first place - to be used by the community. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/tensorflow.org/d/msgid/discuss/092480f0-0629-4b63-81d1-f9dfc1871db4n%40tensorflow.org.

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Levi D. McClenny

Dept. of Electrical Engineering | Texas A&M University

levidm...@gmail.com

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918.232.7131

[Marko Rajković]

Thank You Levi for Your response. I mean, I just want to be sure and clear all doubts that I am having for using those Google's patents so that for even very basic example (such as training simple neural network on my own dataset that contains those layers) everything will be legal and according to the law.