Today at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2024, CNCF announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a patent troll bounty program in which cloud native developers and technologists can earn swag and win prizes by helping protect our ecosystem from patent trolls.
Why we need to protect our ecosystem from trolls
Patent trolls are increasingly targeting cloud native open source due to its success and broad ubiquity. Kubernetes is the most often targeted project, but other cloud native open source projects have also caught the attention of trolls. Patent trolls are companies that don’t sell any products and services; their only business activity is buying patents and threatening adopters of technology with patent lawsuits (learn more about trolls).
How cloud native technologists can help
Members of our community can help us disarm patent trolls by providing evidence that the invention described in the troll’s patent wasn’t actually “new” at the time the patent application was filed. If the invention wasn’t “new” on the application date, then the resulting patent is not valid. Evidence of invalidity can neutralize or weaken a troll’s ability to weaponize its patents against our community.
Evidence of such pre-existing technology – referred to by patent lawyers as “prior art” – could be in the form of open source documentation (including release notes), published standards or specifications, product manuals, articles, blogs, books, or any publicly available information.
Members of our technical community – as subject matters experts in cloud native tech – are uniquely qualified to help us find prior art to defeat trolls.
Enter our Inaugural Challenge!
The Cloud Native Heroes Challenge will be a series of crowdsourced prior art contests, starting with a single Inaugural Contest that launched today. To learn more, visit www.cncf.io/heroes and read about the inaugural contest here.
About Our Co-Host for the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge
CNCF is co-hosting this program with Unified Patents, the Linux Foundation’s partner in patent troll deterrence since 2019. Unified Patents is the only organization that uses offensive community-driven strategies to deter patent trolls.