Sunday, April 25, 2010

A New Hope

Last year I shut down this blog.

There was some genuine criticism at the time that having a blog dedicated to exploring which other parts of Linux infringe patents was a bad idea.

Over time, I was won over that side and decided to stop the work and can a dozen of posts that were ready to go out.

Today, we are changing course.

Although I had been won over to the "Let us be quiet, and hope nobody notices" side over some argument over triple damages, as it turns out, this is quite a weak argument.

Andrew Tridgell delivered a talk where he details why reading software patents is a good idea. I will not repeat his arguments here.

So let us use this blog to help out open source where it matters: identifying non-infringement, prior art and helping invalidate bogus patents.

The time is right, and we have already missed too many opportunities this year. From ex-Sun CEO's confessions of Apple attacks on competitors, to white knights turning grey.

It was a fun year to watch, and no proper outlet to discuss it was available. Nokia sued Apple and the open source community sided with Nokia; Then Apple sued HTC (really Google) and the community sided with HTC; Then IBM threatened some nobodies over patent infringement and the community jumped to IBM's defense.

And all of this time, we lost track of one thing: software patents are bad, they must be abolished and there is no middle ground. Either we are against software patents in general, or we are not. There is no room to cut anyone any breaks.

So with this in mind, publishing will resume.

We will initially focus on patents that the open source stack infringes.

Welcome back!

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