While much of the industry lives in fear of a patent troll rearing its ugly head, Cognex has decided to take on trolls like Lemelson and Acacia, and has been spanking them on a regular basis.
As PJ at Groklaw notes, it's far too early to throw up our hands in despair at the dreaded patent trolls:
Imagine if [Cognex] had, instead, thrown up his hands, assumed there was no hope, said the patent system was a joke, the system totally corrupt, etc. and just paid for a license he knew, and as he later proved, he didn't need? Nobody needs it now. It's history. Thank you, Cognex. Cynics give up too easily, methinks.
Amen. What a great day it would be if everyone who believed themselves unfairly sued for patent infringement fought back. Imagine what would happen if companies like Microsoft were forced to back up their words about patent infringement, and then lost in court.
Eventually, the courts would clear out the riffraff. What a great day that would be.
As an avid reader of Groklaw, it was great to see this interview with Pamela Jones, founder and editor of the service on internet.com. She has been blamed for bringing down SCO's house of cards (sometimes known as "lies"), which is testimony enough to the power the site has come to hold.
Groklaw is more than a place to pick on SCO, however fun that might be. Groklaw does an excellent job of parsing complex legal proceedings and distilling them into language the lay person can understand. It's also a great place to see one aspect of the future of journalism:
Q: Groklaw's coverage of OpenXML/ODF affairs has become symbolic of the powers of collaboration in an Internet era. It showed that stories can explored at a level of detail that is overlooked or unexplored by traditional media. Do you think that journalism can be improved by pooling the knowledge of more people?...
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It's almost funny (almost) to see how out-of-context my words can be taken. On one side, I can have Microsoft calling me to ask me to not criticize the company as I so often do (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and....you get the point).
Then I have Groklaw suggesting that I'm wrong to think the OSI shouldn't discriminate against groups bringing licenses to it based on past behavior. I would have thought that, if weighed in the balance, people would tend to find me anti-Microsoft (though I admit I don't find it hard at all to separate out Microsoft's products from its strategies). But not enough for some in the open-source community, apparently. This is unfortunate, as I'm a regular reader and supporter of the work that Pamela does at Groklaw.
The sad thing is, the OSI and the open-source community may have brought this upon ourselves.
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