GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit

Posted May 28, 2020 19:01 UTC (Thu) by zoobab (guest, #9945)
In reply to: GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit by littlesandra88
Parent article: GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit

A missed opportunity to create caselaw against software patents in the US, using Alice.

Also, GNOME smells OIN and IBM, the first lobby that wants to restore software patents in the US via the STRONGER patent act.

Now Rpi can continue to troll and parasites other companies with their patent.

So much for 'victory' for freedom.

GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit

Posted May 28, 2020 19:15 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> Now Rpi can continue to troll and parasites other companies with their patent.

But only to the extent those companies are releasing proprietary software.

GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit

Posted May 28, 2020 21:09 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (1 responses)

It's a 100% victory for all FOSS software and that's what I care about. It's not the FOSS community's responsibility to defend "freedom" for the entire world.

If proprietary software companies want to fight that fight, they are more than welcome to do so and spend their money on it. If they don't want to fight and would rather pay royalties, that's fine with me too: it's their money.

But I'm very happy to see that FOSS becomes that much easier a choice to make (fewer patent troll issues) and that my investments in FOSS are not being used on legal battles that only benefit proprietary software instead of on making FOSS software stronger.

If there was no way to help FOSS without also helping proprietary companies (i.e., we had to go to court and invalidate the patents) then that's fine. And if the cost/effort/resources was the same to do both that's fine too. But if it costs the FOSS community much more to defend all software than it does to just defend FOSS software, then with our limited resources there's no question that the latter is the right choice to make.

BTW, I say this as someone who does develop proprietary software for $DAYJOB, and whose company is small and definitely not rich enough to take a big company to court (or defend against same)!

GNOME resolves Rothschild patent suit

Posted Jun 2, 2020 14:44 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> If proprietary software companies want to fight that fight, they are more than welcome to do so and spend their money on it. If they don't want to fight and would rather pay royalties, that's fine with me too: it's their money.

If proprietary software companies *lose* that fight, and thus create precedent in *favor* of software patents (de facto, if not de jure) that hurts everyone. Including FOSS projects. If you ignore the cases you're not personally sympathetic to there won't be anyone left to help when your turn comes.