Bradley and Karen discuss the details of the completion
of the lawsuit (which Conservancy supported) between Christoph Hellwig and
VMware in Germany.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:37 )

• Bradley mentioned the episode of Red Dwarf,
  White
  Hole, where the characters
  are speaking too slowly or two quickly due to time
  differentials. (01:30 )



• Bradley explained that the
  Hellwig vs. VMware suit in Germany has concluded. (03:30 )



• German is a civil law
  legal system. (05:15 )



• Christoph Hellwig announced
  on his website that he has decided not to appeal. (07:18 )



• Bradley did a technical
  analysis how much of Christoph's code appeared in the infringing VMware
  product. (07:50 )



• Till Jaeger
  was Christoph's lawyer; Till was also the lawyer for Harald Welte's
  (currently defunct) gpl-violations.org
  project. (09:04 )

Segment 1 (09:26 )

• “Trolling”
  refers to being a non-practicing entity. Patrick McHardy is specifically
  a practicing entity, since he upstreamed a lot of code in
  Linux. (09:50 )



• Bradley was thinking of the patent troll, Intellectual
  Ventures. (10:40 )



• Bradley that the Eastern
  district of Texas hears many patent cases in the USA. (10:50 )



• Bradley mentioned a This
  American Life, Episode 411, which discussed patents. Show
  hosts/producers Laura Sydell and Alex Blumberg visit one of those
  “empty-but-not” office buildings in the Eastern District of
  Texas. (11:18 )



• Bradley
  and Karen wrote about Patrick McHardy's behavior back in July 2016
  — Conservancy was the first to talk about it publicly. Bradley
  sought to prevent the “compliance industrial complex” from
  using knowledge of Patrick's behavior to unduly scare people. (13:10 )



• Conservancy (with FSF) also published the
  Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement (15:10 )



• The rest of the Netfilter team,
  except for Patrick McHardy, endorsed the
  Principles. (16:30 )



• The VMware suit started 2015-03-05, and began before Patrick McHardy
  started his problematic behavior. While the VMware suit was working its
  way through the court, McHardy had filed many inappropriate
  lawsuits. (18:30 )



• German court decisions are very rarely published, but thanks to hard
  work by everyone involved, the appeal
  decision, and the lower
  Court's decision (the latter of which was also translated
  into English.) (27:30 )

Segment 2 (33:01 )

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