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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

Nope. They just had to agree to stop trolling open source projects with patents they already own.

They can still troll non-OSI-licensed projects with those patents and can still troll open source projects with new invalid patents.

We could stop issuing invalid patents (I'm not holding my breath), develop a legal defense fund to do this again (thus maybe scaring off future trolls) as the article suggests, or change the law.

If we change the law we could do something minimal like the article suggests (eg: allow proof the code being sued over predates the patent to be presented at the summary judgment stage) OR (my favorite) something bigger like eliminating software patents entirely.

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> They just had to agree to stop trolling open source projects with patents they already own.

That's not what this analysis says.

To quote the linked article: The ultimate agreement reached, as you can read, does just that: gives a perpetual covenant not to sue any project under an OSI approved open source licence for any patent naming Leigh Rothschild as the inventor (i.e. the settlement terms go far beyond the initial patent claim and effectively free all of open source from any future litigation by Rothschild).

So it protects against any future patents from this "inventor" too.

Or just stop doing software patterns. I live in a country where there is no software patterns, and I dont miss them.

The patent office has largely stopped granting software patents, from what I've gathered, or they're at least being more careful. So we're just waiting for the existing ones to expire.

As someone who files patents (and then gives away royalty-free licenses to them), this has not been my experience.

Fwiw, USPTO, EPO, WIPO, and probably OAPI and ARIPO (not sure about these two), and whoever else, grant patents for software. Outside USA the rules are stricter; and business methods usually aren't allowed.

The EPC ("European" patents) allows software patents with a 'technical effect'.

>We could stop issuing invalid patents //

This is akin to "we could stop making software with bugs" in a situation where some programmers are actively seeking programmes with bugs. In theory, maybe, in practice you need to lower your standards below perfect.

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