11.20.19
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft and IBM Are the Patent Trolls, They Won’t Protect Us From Trolls
Times have changed; Red Hat and Microsoft are now close partners.
Summary: “Microsoft has no taste” and IBM has no taste, either; they’re lying to our collective face together with OIN and the ‘Linux’ Foundation
IBM has long cross-licensed with Microsoft. This means they won’t sue one another over patents. Good for them, eh? Shared monopoly. No wonder Red Hat nowadays promotes Microsoft things almost every day. Now that IBM owns Red Hat (and all of its patents) IBM won’t care about Microsoft’s ongoing — even in 2019 — blackmail of OEMs that ship GNU/Linux.
Now Microsoft and IBM, the biggest purveyors of software patent trolls, tell us they’ll protect from what they are, themselves [1-3]. Wow, the audacity! Joined by their front groups, OIN, a false representative to/of Free software, and Linux Foundation, a GitHub outsourcer which compares Microsoft to "a puppy". They use a lawsuit against GNOME (Foundation) to take us astray from abolishing software patents. Both IBM and Microsoft are feeding patent trolls, are blackmailing companies that implement things they themselves never did, and lobby aggressively for software patents in the US. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Open Invention Network teams up with IBM, Linux Foundation, and Microsoft to protect open-source software from patent trolls
Open-source software — heck, all software — has been plagued by patent trolls for decades. The Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, is now expanding protection of open-source and Linux by partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft to further protect it from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), aka patent trolls. This new consortium is doing this by supporting Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription.
Unified Patents is an international organization of over 200 businesses. Unified Patents takes an aggressive stance against trolls. The name of its game is deterring trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The Open Source Zone is the newest of these Zones.
United Patents does this in a variety of ways. For example, it runs a public bounty program, where it seeks prior art for troll patents. According to Kevin Jakel, Unified Patents CEO, in a recent interview, “The prize money offered can be as much as $10,000 for anyone that is able to find prior patents on the one being questioned. For example, we recently announced a $10,000 bounty for any prior art relating to network monitoring and sequence integrity.”
In practice, their method works. For instance, with Unified Patent’s aid, the ride-sharing company Lyft recently beat a patent troll. In the case, a troll claimed essentially he has created all ride-sharing software. US District Judge Jon S Tigar ruled against the troll, saying, “Given the lack of an algorithm for allocation, RideApp ‘has in effect claimed everything that [performs the task] under the sun.”
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SUSE welcomes cooperation of Open Invention Network, Linux Foundation, IBM and Microsoft in co-funding Unified Patent’s new Open Source Zone
An eternal truth is that everything has its opposite for good and evil. Patents are no exception. In fact, even the simple word ‘Patent’ evokes much positive and negative emotion in today’s software world – particularly as news continues to circulate around baseless patent lawsuits by non-practicing entities (NPEs).
But in news this week there is a bit of positive for a change. The positive news is the announcement of the efforts by Unified Patents to reduce NPE assertion of invalid patents in the open source software zone. -
Open Invention Network Joins Forces With IBM, Linux Foundation And Microsoft
Open Invention Network (OIN) is teaming up with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
The group will support Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users.
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