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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

If anyone from the Gnome team is listening, if you guys started a GoFundMe or something to help with legal fees to challenge this, I would throw twenty bucks your way.

I'd be happy if someone held me to that.

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The GNOME Foundation takes donations[0], I think it would probably be good if they had some way to signal that you only want the money in a legal defense fund (especially given that sometimes they put Foundation resources behind controversial things which I myself don't want to support).

Nonetheless I'm throwing some money into the pot, hopefully it is used to fight this troll case, which thankfully may be so facially ridiculous that it is thrown out.

[0]: https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/donate/

Not a GNOME user so I have no idea what the GNOME foundation gets up too, what sort of controversial things have they funded in the past?

Look at the staff list https://www.gnome.org/foundation/staff/ . It's top heavy with useless people running "diversity initiatives" and "anti-harassment teams" and only one Gtk dev. If they had 10 developers then maybe there'd be a place for these people, but at the moment I don't agree with their priorities.

I'd happily donate to a legal fund to fight this lawsuit though.

The role of a typical FLOSS foundation is to enable development by providing neutral infrastructure and organizational efforts, for example organizing conferences & hackfests with travel reimbursements, boring accounting & paperwork, maintaining trademarks, avoiding legal risks; the actual development will be done by interested companies and individuals.

I think part of what flukus was getting at is not supported by that staff page. GNOME has outreach and sponsorship programs, but they all seem to be gender discriminatory, and focused more on external social causes than on the quality of GNOME software.

GNOME Foundation could probably just use GitLab.com, it wouldn't take a full time staff if their focus was infrastructure. It seems like the GNOME Foundation is predisposed with gaining institutional power over the symbols of GNOME, to egoistically control the community.

I would donate to an effort to kill this patent as well.

We have to start getting more aggressive in these scenarios. If the patent isn't killed, they're just going to turn around and sue someone else with it. So if we want a world where small players can compete with the likes of Microsoft or Facebook, we need to retaliate against trolls who go after small players.

It's not just the patent. That whole company needs to be killed. They serve no useful purpose; the epitome of bullshit jobs.

Honestly I wish more countries would take New Zealand's approach and just outright ban all software patents. There is no reason any software patent should exist.

I don't disagree, but I don't think you can bring a legal case to a judge that a company can't exist.

But if every one of their threats resulted in someone dragging them into an expensive fight over whether or not that patent was valid, maybe eventually they'd just go bankrupt from the legal fees.

Essentially, use their own strategy against them. Whenever they sue someone, they have two choices: roll over and let the patent get invalidated, or fight an expensive lawsuit against a party that refuses to settle.

Where is the satisfaction of having a troll bankrupted by litigation? If the troll went bankrupt, it probably means:

* The lawyers got paid so much money there is no more money left to pay the receptionist and the power company and the copier rental.

* The troll is protected from paying any damages to the legal team that defeated them.

So the lawyers/executives suck up all the money and move on, leaving a wake of destruction behind them. In many cases, that should be considered criminal.

> That whole company needs to be killed.

And the owners both bankrupted and jailed, or they'll just do it again.

There are still ways you can patent software in New Zealand. I knew a guy who did it and IIRC it was granted on the basis of there being a comparatively small hardware component.

> GoFundMe

oh, that American health insurance website.

I mean didn't the people of Belgium recently did the equivalent of gofundme to raise money for treatment for a toddler for the drug Zolgensma?

Belgium, I dunno. But it happened in Portugal. Governmeant ended up paying for the medicine. The parents kept the €2.5m...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49739845

Yeah, that's exactly what it is...

Ditto. Patent trolls need to be destroyed.

Put me down for $20 if it comes up.

Same here. Documenting and open-sourcing the legal effort around this could be good experience for people that help in other similar situations.

I'm in for $20 too.

I'm in.

It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to need a lot more then $20.

He will not be the only one throwing $20...

I know, but $60,000 / $20/person = ~3,000 people. That really isn't that much in the scope of things.

Donating to an open source project to combat a software patent troll?

I could already see this story making headlines in pretty much every tech news outlet there is. They'd get a few thousand individual donations for sure.

And sadly it will be the lawyers laughing their way to the bank.

Or will some of the money be recovered if the case is won? Thinking about it, wouldn't it be fair if you were more than compensated in case you won a lawsuit filed against you?

Aren't expenses for lawyers compensated by the losing party?

Loser pays (the English rule[0]) can apply in the U.S. but is quite uncommon. Most of the time both parties are responsible for their own legal fees[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney's_fees...

> Federal courts also possess inherent authority to assess attorney’s fees and litigation costs against a plaintiff who has acted in bad faith, vexatiously, wantonly or for oppressive reasons.

Patent trolls obviously act in bad faith.

> It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to need a lot more then $20.

Wow, that's all? That's actually really encouraging, if true. I would have assumed it was millions.

Even if that is correct, you still need to have a couple hundred grand in reserve in case the judge is a dumbass and you lose.

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