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• Lawsuit Raises Questions about Open Invention Network, Linux Foundation

  Tweets get as much coverage as interviews these days, it seems. Tweets lack nuance and usually lack context and do not form a good basis for journalism (or indeed spin-doctoring) without additional discussion in person.

  The author of this article quotes what I said on Twitter in 140 tongue-in-cheek characters:

  The ORCL-GOOG case makes OIN and the Linux Foundation look like the League of Nations at the start of WW2.

  If you need to read up the history, try Wikipedia. Of course my comment is hyperbolic and can be contested on all sorts of grounds – it was on Twitter, for goodness sake, it’s not a position paper!

  The point of this comment was not to dismiss the Linux Foundation or OIN. Rather, it was to observe that for whatever reason, to the average meta-community member they would have been expected to keep the peace among their members and prevent conflict over software patents breaking out. Clearly that didn’t happen here.

  Neither has commented so far, perhaps because they are genuinely engaging in diplomacy (sources suggest this). All the same, they don’t appear to have sanctions available to use against their errant members, nor do they and their direct supporters believe there is actually any duty for them to do so. I have now heard from a number of commentators annoyed I should even suggest there is something abnormal going on here.

  Software patents are broken and the only possible justification for having them is self-defence (which is itself a risky accumulation of armaments). Perhaps OIN and the Linux Foundation need to make membership conditional on members taking no first action against each other with software patents? That way there would at least be consequences of aggression, rather than just a foot-shuffling silence and potshots at people like me for “not understanding”. The article’s author says:

  Phipps, I believe, is not arguing against the OIN and the LF so much as arguing for something else: an additional solution/entity that could put the kibosh on lawsuits like these.

  Exactly.

• Oracle loses another DTrace creator
  Adam Leventhal joins the diaspora.

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