Once More Unto the Breach: Patents, Red Hat, and Hibernate

“I participated in a panel discussion on the future of open
source and IP hosted by SDForum in January. The consensus of our
group (mostly lawyers with a lot of experience in IP law and open
source) was that the business economics of the situation would
actually prevail before legislative change in a system constrained
by deep pockets in other industries with different dynamics and
entrenched views. A few messy law suits, and rulings similar to the
recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on damage and injunctions, and
companies will begin to realize that software patents make bad
business investments, and they will spend their dollars on more
urgent and important things.

“This current lawsuit will run its course. The other
organizations that have open source patent protection mechanisms
(e.g. The Open Invention Network, and the Patent Commons Project
hosted by the Open Source Development Labs) will get to test and
tune their organizational responses…”

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