I think the blog title is a bit sensational here. 'Patent trolls', at least as I understand the term, do not produce products. That's the whole point: they're trolls because they do nothing but sue people, without adding any value themselves. Twin Peaks does produce products, so they aren't a troll. Red Hat has just found an interesting way to counter-sue in a fairly ordinary patent dispute.<p>The fact that Twin Peaks clearly waited until Gluster had been acquired by Red Hat before filing doesn't make it a troll.
"Intellectual property" as a socially and legally recognized concept is nonsensical and harmful, even in instances like the GPL where it's intended to increase freedom.
This is not going to be effective <i>unless</i> Red Hat really pushes for damages. Shutting down Twin Peaks products is not a big deal, they will just release the source of their mount.mfs and/or rewrite the mount, and then push out a new version that doesn't violate mount's license.
>Since both of Twin Peaks' products are released under a proprietary license, there was no source code of any changes it made to mount released, which is a violation of the GPLv2.<p>Seems like Twin Peaks could resolve this by just releasing the source code to their version of mount. Maybe Red Hat will be able to get damages out of it, but if Twin Peaks releases the code in a timely fashion, I doubt Red Hat will be able to get an injunction against their product sales. (IANAL.) Meanwhile, the patent suit goes on.
My only hope in this double-case is that if TPS offers an even settlement, RedHat refuses it.<p>Fighting GPL violations is the "good" side, patent trolling the "bad".
>Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software<p>That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified <i>and</i> distributed/sold.
Could we (as in, everyone) please stop referring to programs in general as "apps"? It's
retarded. An "app" is a specific kind of program for a smartphone. mount isn't
such a program.<p>Sorry, this just bugged me.