Bottomley: Lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll Incident

James Bottomley got a copy of the patent-suit settlement between the GNOMEFoundation and Leigh Rothschild and has postedan analysis. "Although the agreement achieves its aim, to ridall of Open Source of the Rothschild menace, it also contains severalclauses which are suboptimal, but which had to be included to get a speedyresolution. In particular, Clause 10 forbids the GNOME foundation or itsaffiliates from publishing the agreement, which has caused much angst inopen source circles about how watertight the agreement actuallywas. Secondly Clause 11 prohibits GNOME or its affiliates from pursuing anyfurther invalidity challenges to any Rothschild patents leaving Rothschildfree to pursue any non open source targets.Fortunately the effect of clause 10 is now mitigated by me publishing theagreement and the effect of clause 11 by the fact that the Open InventionNetwork is now pursuing IPR invalidity actions against the Rothschildpatents."