Bottomley: Lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll Incident
James Bottomley got a copy of the patent-suit settlement between the GNOME
Foundation and Leigh Rothschild and has posted
an analysis. "Although the agreement achieves its aim, to rid
all of Open Source of the Rothschild menace, it also contains several
clauses which are suboptimal, but which had to be included to get a speedy
resolution. In particular, Clause 10 forbids the GNOME foundation or its
affiliates from publishing the agreement, which has caused much angst in
open source circles about how watertight the agreement actually
was. Secondly Clause 11 prohibits GNOME or its affiliates from pursuing any
further invalidity challenges to any Rothschild patents leaving Rothschild
free to pursue any non open source targets.

Fortunately the effect of clause 10 is now mitigated by me publishing the
agreement and the effect of clause 11 by the fact that the Open Invention
Network is now pursuing IPR invalidity actions against the Rothschild
patents."