The Patent Pledge

Looking at the names I assume these companies dont have a lot of patents.<p>Small companies with few/no patents have strong motivation to join (the possibility of limited protection for free) and nothing to lose by doing so, since they have few or no patent rights to assert.<p>Big companies with lots of patents have little to gain, since there are a very small set of patents on the list. They have lots to lose: the inability to use their big investment in IP in a competitive way.<p>So why would holders of large patent portfolios want to join this? Chicken, meet egg.<p>Btw, I detest sw patents too.

This is a positive idea, but I think it should be done somewhat differently. I'm not sure the size of the company is the main factor. Instead, I would like to see something like<p>&#62; No use of software patents against open source code<p>Companies could then protect themselves from patent lawsuits by open sourcing their code, which makes sense since everyone benefits from open source code.

Signups may be slow as long as the app is requesting unnecessarily broad OAuth access to signees' Twitter accounts:<p>"This application will be able to: read Tweets from your timeline; see who you follow, and follow new people; update your profile; post Tweets for you."

I remember reading something about game theory and why things like this never work. Maybe someone more versed in game theory can explain better?