On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 10:04:03 +0200 "W. Kosior" <kos...@koszko.org> wrote: > may I ask what are the remedies for patent threat? For patents I'm not an expert.
As I understand here there are software patents but also hardware patents. For software patents we (the free software community at large) has already good expertise on how to mitigate the risk. As I understand we pressure governments at various levels to not authorize patents, or when they are somewhat valid, work through their abolition or make the law more harmless. In conjunction with that, when attacked with good lawyers and community defense (like fighting together along with community research to invalidate patents) we sometimes win in countries where there are still some (weak) patent laws that cover software. We already have good information on all that, which includes the end software patents project with its website and wiki (which has a lot of information on court cases and so on)[1]. Court cases like the attack on Gnome[2] can also be studied to come up with good defenses that work. We also had a website dedicated to FLOSS related legal cases that covered many lawsuits back in the days[3] that probably covered several cases related to software patents when the laws governing software patents in the USA were worse than what they are today. For hardware patents I don't know much about them. I don't know if or how that affect FPGAs or chips with hard-wired logic, or what strategies that were effective against software patents could be reused. So the best way would probably be to talk to companies that are involved in making phones and that are friendly to the free software community like Puri.sm or Pine64. As for PCBs as I understand many companies derive their designs from reference designs so I'm unsure in which way this affects patents. Note that with hardware we should also not underestimate companies pressure. For instance if you make a phone with an integrated modem and you threaten the market share of some modem manufacturers that are powerful you might also have harder times sourcing other components (in large quantity with decent prices) due to pressure from companies. If however you only do a modem and that the modem is modular (like in MPCIe or smaller form factor), and that you are independent enough, and that phones also have standard connectors for your modem, then it would be way harder to make any commercial pressure. References: ----------- [1]https://endsoftwarepatents.org/ [2]https://foundation.gnome.org/tag/patents/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw Denis.
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