For some time now, Microsoft has been accusing the FOSS community of violating its patents. FOSS journalists have been calling their bluff for about as long. And now the patent armageddon game is on. And we could have prevented this all along.

A tech vendor-backed company that buys up patents in an effort to protect the Linux community from intellectual property litigation will soon launch a Web site to help inventors file defensive publications -- documents that make details of an invention public, preventing others from later making patent claims on it.

Without a Fair Troll, it (Defensive Patent License supporters) is just a "Coalition of the Harmless". What's needed is at least one (ideally more than one) entity that will assert patents from the DPL pool very aggressively and systematically against entities who don't support the DPL.

Simon Phipps proposes a hard problem: expanding the definition of "open source" to include patents.

The easy part is dealing with any patents that are actually licensable by the person or company who is licensing the code. To get to a new "definition" you could say that copyright licenses that don't also grant a patent license must be accompanied by a patent license grant.

A couple of weeks ago Google announced their WebM project, which provided a free software implementation of their VP8 video codec and a license to exercise the patents the company held on the software.

There have been many claims over the purchase of 22 patents by the Open Invention Network. Some have lauded the cunning of OIN in snatching the patents away from patent trolls. Others suggest the OIN have acquired useful defensive patents. The trouble is that the process of acquiring the patents is relatively opaque.

Tech companies are playing hardball on smart phones, yet Linux could gain the upper hand with Intel and Nokia going on the defensive with MeeGo. To get you on Facebook while on the bus, play a tune, and - oh, yeah - make a call, Microsoft and Apple are finding new ways to reign in the competition on phones: they're using patent threats.

This week Mozilla joined Open Invention Network as a licensee. OIN is an organization which helps protect the Linux ecosystem by building a variety of defenses against patent attacks.

Users of free and open source software (“FOSS”) have little to gain and much to fear from the patent system. The patent system poses two major threats to users: