Red Hat Fights Patent Troll With GPL

jfruh writes "Red Hat is in the middle of a patent lawsuit with Twin Peaks Software, which claims that a Red Hat subsidiary is abusing a Twin Peaks filesystem lawsuit. Now, Red Hat is launching an intriguing countermeasure: the company claims that Twin Peaks' own closed source software violates the GPL because it makes use of an open source disk utility that Red Hat holds the copyright on. Is this a smart move on Red Hat's part?"

Comments

Not a NPE, Is it a Troll?

[ZombieBraintrust]

Doesn't seem to be a Patent Troll if the company has a product. Trolls are generally Non Practicing Entities. Are we going to start calling Apple, Google, and Microsoft patent trolls now?

Re:Not a NPE, Is it a Troll?

[bwcbwc]

In selected cases where the patent is obvious or duplicated by prior art, yes a lawsuit is still trolling even if you actually make use of the invention..

Re:Not a NPE, Is it a Troll?

[recoiledsnake]

Traditionally speaking, a patent troll was an NPE. I HATE rephrasings of meanings, which lead to the exact same 100 comment threads about the following issues:

1) Open Source vs. open source
2) Free vs. free vs. libre vs. beer vs. freedom
3) Stealing vs. Copyright infringement
4) Patent Troll vs. patent troll

Genius of the GPL revealed once again

[Anonymous Coward]

Laugh all you want, but RMS keeps getting proved right over and over about Free Software.

Re:Doesn't matter

[gomiam]

I guess the judge would usually consent, in that case, to reveal the code to experts under condition of secrecy. That way, the experts would be able to check whether the copyright allegations have any base and the code, should it not be infringing, would still stay closed.

Even if the code was considered infringing, it would only need to be revealed to those customers that asked for it before three years (since the ruling in this case?) have passed. Unless one of those customer asks for it and decides to publish it, the code would still be unavailable.