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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Good on Mr. Smith. But was he in any way involved with the legal defense team for GNOME?

The story reads to me like GNOME spent $150k on a legal defense that saved themselves and carved out a little niche for FOSS projects, but otherwise allowed the patent troll to continue profiting from this patent.

> Of course, that’s little comfort to the 20+ victims attacked after GNOME with the now-proven-worthless Rothschild ‘086 patent, or the 50+ companies targeted with related patents that haven’t yet been re-examined.

Meanwhile, it looks like Mr. Smith basically did what the GNOME defense team should have done from the start and got the patent invalidated, with no funds to speak of.

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When GNOME was raising the 150k they said they would not settle and would battle until the patent was overturned. People donated based upon this and then GNOME settled. This is why when things like the he said/she said argument with System 76 have come up I am mystified that some people are ready to believe GNOME's take. They have already shown that they are a project whose leadership's word can't be trusted.

According to the Gnome website they didn't have to pay their lawyers, so I'm wondering where that money went.

> GNOME was represented pro-bono by Matt Berkowitz, Kieran Kieckhefer, Joy Wang and Larry Crouch from Shearman & Sterling LLP.

https://foundation.gnome.org/2020/05/20/patent-case-against-...

There are lots of expenses in a legal case besides just the lawyers, like expert witness, process servers, etc..

I suspect it went into the settlement payment. Wouldn't it be ironic if so many principled advocates of open source and supporters of the GNOME project had their funds paid directly to a patent troll by GNOME themselves?

GNOME did not pay in the original settlement.

- "I can confirm that we have not paid RPI or Leigh Rothschild for this settlement."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264806

> not paid RPI or Leigh Rothschild for this settlement

That statement still leaves a lot of people that they could have paid for that settlement (or paid RPI/Leigh for a different settlement).

Probably paid the troll's lawyer, instead. Which is of course also the troll.

> I'm wondering where that money went.

I was wondering the same about the $1M donation they got in 2018. Turns out they misallocated a significant portion of it to things like social outreach programs.

There is nothing wrong with having SRPs if you're a multi-billion tech giant, but a underfunded open source product shouldn't be wasting money on social programs when their primary product was broken (which, in 2018, gnome3 certainly was). At the very least, they could have used it to hold proper user-focus groups to find out how their users actually used their product.

I think the organization is suffering from a serious mismanagement issue.

This comment makes no sense at all, every open source non-profit I've ever seen has made social outreach programs their main goal. There's nothing else to spend the funding on. They can't spend a ton of money on focus groups specifically because it's not a multi-billion tech giant and these foundations legally can't be making decisions based on how to make some product profitable. You need to ask a company to do that. These foundations have to make decisions based on their stated mission which is almost always solving a social issue. So in that sense the "primary product" of the foundation is really the community around the project, it actually can't be the project itself.

If you want to start another organization that only does user focus groups then by all means do it, but otherwise you're barking up the wrong tree. The designers (not the foundation) already do user studies regularly anyway, the reason they don't do full focus groups all the time is because it gets expensive real fast.

> making decisions based on how to make some product profitable

Who said anything about profit? How about paying devs & designers, awarding bug bounties, and user testing?

Paying devs and designers to do what? Testing for what? To make a product more profitable so you can further grow the foundation? If it's not doing social outreach or otherwise fulfilling the social mission of the nonprofit then I hope you understand it falls in that category and they can't legally do that, go to any of the member companies if you want that. When these nonprofits hire actual engineers and designers it's usually only on a contract basis to fix very specific problems that have to do with social issues around the project. It's otherwise hard for them to justify hiring staff to do that.

I wish you were wrong. I just looked this up out of curiousity, and Gnome themselves had their charity status denied by the IRS for this reason-

> You have a substantial nonexempt purpose because you develop software published under open source compatible licenses that authorize use by any person for any purpose, including nonexempt purposes such as commercial, recreational, or personal purposes, including campaign intervention and lobbying.

> Mere publishing under open source licenses for all to use does not show that the poor and underprivileged actually use the Tools. ? You do not limit your distribution and do not know who uses the Tools much less if they use them for artistic purposes. ? you do not know who uses the Tools much less what kind of content they create with the Tools.

That said it should be clear here that this was explicitly for a charity, not just a non profit, but even still it's pretty messed up.

I don't think it's that messed up. If you really want to make something that qualifies as a charity (or a for-profit business) then you can just do that separately. The existence of this foundation doesn't get in the way, they're a home for the trademarks and a few other things but otherwise they don't have much bearing on what you would do.

But there are some people at the foundation who would make it their goal to hire more developers, if the funding was there, it currently isn't.

That reasoning is like denying charity status to a church thrift store because they don't do income verification at the door, to ensure that only poor customers are allowed to shop there.

No, it's not even close to that. Analogies aren't that good of a tool to use here.

Uhh, the Linux Foundation is a non-profit that sponsors people to work on Linux the kernel. How's that possible then?

That's an extremely small percentage, most Linux developers aren't sponsored by the Linux Foundation. The majority of their expenses go towards events and training.

So you're saying it's a question of the threshold of "substantial". Okay, I can believe that.

Not really, the question is how the organization is classified. Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) so they can sponsor some people but it's only for the purposes of furthering "common business interests" and not for profit.

The GNOME Foundation defense fund donation website for this case is still open and accepting donations. In fact donations have been made to it recently. Why hasn't the site been shutdown or the text at the site modified to reflect that the suit has been long settled by the GNOME Foundation?

>I am mystified that some people are ready to believe GNOME's take

I won't comment on the issue itself, but the way you're framing this is total and complete nonsense. GNOME didn't have a "take", it was a blog written independently by one developer. You're confusing the Foundation itself with random developers. AFAIK System 76 also never put out any official statements, it was again more random unofficial statements by random employees. I would actually be more disappointed if either of these organizations' management was wasting their time making official statements on pointless open source drama.

I'm not confusing a lone developer with the GNOME Foundation. I was referencing statements made in a GNOME Foundation press release.

I have no idea which press release you're talking about, every search I did on the subject turned up this news article or another one with very similar content, where there's no official press release: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/10/system76_gnome_deskto...

Searching through the foundation's news posts shows only one press release about system76, which is positive in tone and isn't related to any argument: https://foundation.gnome.org/?s=system76

If you could post this press release so I could read it, that would be great. Maybe I'm just stupid and I missed something obvious. But I think you may be misremembering this.

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