A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Well this is interesting. It's an article by a non-attorney about the GNOME foundation's fight against a suit by a Rothschild NPE. The article links to the settlement agreement and characterizes it as including a covenant not to sue from all Rothschild entities against anyone based on the use of software licensed under all of the biggest open-source licenses.

Last year, a Rothschild entity sued the GNOME foundation for infringement by its product GNOME, which is a well-known open-source component of many GNU/Linux- and Unix-based operating systems.

The parties settled in May 2020, and the press releases and news reports at the time suggested that the settlement protected other open source software from future Rothschild suits.

Now that we can see the language of the covenant not to sue, it looks like they weren't kidding. At least on the surface, the covenant not to sue appears to cover all Rothschild entities controlled by Leigh Rothschild, and to release anyone from claims of infringement based on the use of software under any one of a long list of open-source licenses.

Off the top of my head, the list seems to include many of the most popular open-source licenses, including GPL 2.0/3.0, BSD, MIT, Apache, and others.

If I'm not missing something, I can imagine this potentially playing a role in negotiations in Rothschild cases going forward, given the patent exhaustion implications and the fact that many commercial web sites and cloud-based services run on open source software.

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