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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Except almost worse. You can choose to not use a piece of GPL software. You might very well accidentally invent something simple that turns out to be patented.

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How is it worse than if Tesla was aggressively perusing their patents? It's the patent system itself that you have a problem with. Tesla's patent sharing scheme only makes things potentially better for other inventors.

I suppose worse is a matter of perspective, but I think the OP is right that at some scale, someone could be dragged into this good faith deal, like it or not.

Independently invent something. Turns out it's already patented, within this good faith consortium. Now the only way to use it is by participating. Normally, this kind of thing results in getting sued for royalties.

I don't think they would be dragged into it. Just don't use any of the patents in the portfolio that has this clause. You had no right to use them before the clause.

Or negotiate a royalty.

> Normally, this kind of thing results in getting sued for royalties.

You have answered it. Free patent, GPL or not, you'd have this problem. And it's even worse on "normal" cases.

You might also very well accidentally write a piece of code that is not more than trivially different from some GPL code. In fact, I would argue that is much more likely.

I've contributed quite a few patches to open source projects, and sometimes if I'll review other patches I cannot tell the difference between code I've written or that others had written.

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