[DannyBee]

"it's a world where no one is able to bring patent suits against anyone, because it means they are now violating the licenses of every piece of FOSS they're currently using."

It's also a world where entrenched companies can feel free to use whatever technology they want from smaller competitors without fear of lawsuit, and use it to further entrench themselves :)

I'd put a lot more money on that happening than "happy fun kumbaya singing".

This is among the many reasons that apache, et al chose not to use them when revving their licenses. It's totally worth reading the discussions that happened around these issues back then.

As a friend said WRT to this issue: "Everything old is new again"

[emiliobumachar]

>It's also a world where entrenched companies can feel free to use whatever technology they want from smaller competitors without fear of lawsuit, and use it to further entrench themselves

I agree, but software patents are arguably bad enough that doing away with them entirely is worth the collateral.

A legislative solution might exist to have the best of both worlds, but, in the absence of that, suppose there's a copyleft-analogue hacky way to undermine software patents indiscriminately without requiring an Act of Congress. (and that's not a sure thing at all, but suppose.) Wouldn't you press the button?

[carussell]

See my response to your top-level comment above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15051709