Open Source community needs to arm itself November 8, 2007
Posted by rjdohnert in 1.trackback
LinuxWorld wrote an article about the patent landscape and concluded that the OSS community needs to “arm” itself against patent infringement lawsuits. They have the idea that the OSS community needs to start building its own patent portfolio.
The problem
While the Open Source guys have done a good job of finding prior art and getting patents invalidated, which admittedly over 90% of those cases have ended with the patent being validated again after an appeals process, developing your own patent portfolio for a defense is hard to do. The open source community will have a harder time because really what do they do or what have they done thats been innovative? or new? Besides a few things, nothing and what they do have thats patentable is small beans.
Its going to be a hard long road to patent reform and unfortunately the OSS developers will be the ones that will inevitably suffer.
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