[$] Patents and the open-source community

At OSCON 2016 in Austin, a panel of invited experts debated the always-thorny subject of how open-source software projects deal with patents. The panel was packed, featuring representatives from the free-software world, commerce, and the legal community, so there was scarcely enough time to move through the prepared topics in the time allotted, much less to take questions from the audience. But the discussion was able to highlight a number of current issues, including patent abolition, implicit patent licenses, and where the open-source community should focus its efforts to improve matters.