On: The Patent Pledge

[pg]

IIRC none have actually been sued, but one has been sent a letter saying they're violating a competitor's patent. What made me start thinking about this idea was a combination of that letter, this story:

http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/

and the fear that YC applicants working on education software have of the notoriously litigious Blackboard.

[tgriesser → pg]

Interesting, it looks like Blackboard has their own interpretation of a "patent pledge," but it only covers open-source and non-commercial software.

http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/Patents/Patent-Pledge.asp...

[nl → tgriesser]

They did this because of the outrage from the Moodle community over some of these patents.

There was talk of a formal attempt to get some of them overturned but this pledge took a lot of the heat out of the outrage.

[studentrob → tgriesser]

Here's a pledge, fuck software patents. I used blackboard in multiple schools and it was terrible, so screw anyone who tries to impede those who improve upon that system.

Given that PG cannot think of "anything that would have turned out for the worse without software patents", what-say-you we hold out for what is really needed, no software patents. That is, let's wait until this problem gets worse, get even more outraged, and effect our own change by getting businesses for whom we work to stop engaging in these vaine battles