The CNCF's plan to crowdfight patent trolls

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Why enterprise open-source contributors might be the secret weapon against patent trolls, AI models are starting to run into scaling problems, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Don't feed the trolls

It's hard to imagine the rise of the industrial economy without patents, which protected companies and individuals that made important breakthroughs from copycats. However, the U.S. patent system has been under siege during the rise of the information economy, creating almost as many problems for tech companies as it has solved.

Patent trolls — referred to in politer company as "non-practicing entities" — are shell companies or organizations that purchase patents from distressed companies or individuals and instead of actually building anything around those patents, use them to accuse pretty much anyone within shouting range of infringement. It's a big drain on the legal system and organizations like the Linux Foundation, which announced a plan Wednesday at KubeCon to try and fight back.

Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation's CNCF, announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge during his opening remarks Tuesday in Salt Lake City.
"We’re asking Cloud Native Heroes to find examples of what’s known as “prior art” which is publicly available information that an invention already existed prior to the date the patent application was filed," the CNCF said on a landing page explaining the process.
It's an expansion of a partnership unveiled earlier this year with Unified Patents, which among other things organizes contests to help companies and organizations defend against patent trolling.

The first challenge introduced by the CNCF Wednesday involves a patent acquired by Edge Networking Systems that targets anyone using Kubernetes. Edge Networking sued Microsoft earlier this year claiming that Azure Kubernetes Service infringes on that patent.

"In our inaugural contest, we are seeking information that can be used to invalidate Claim 1 from US Patent US-11695823-B1, which has been asserted by Edge Networking Systems LLC, a patent troll, against adopters of Kubernetes," the CNCF wrote.
Anyone who submits evidence of prior art against that patent that dates prior to June 13, 2013, could receive a $3,000 cash prize, which while well-intended is a ludicrously small amount given the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue generated by Kubernetes-adjacent services.
Examples of prior art include release notes, conference presentations, or similar patents issued before 2013.
"The simple message to trolls is: Don't touch open source, because we're not going to cave," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, during a press conference at KubeCon.

The business model behind patent trolling depends on companies deciding to pay a licensing fee rather than deal with the hassle of litigation, as a generation of mobile computing companies learned a decade ago. Leaving aside the question of whether the current patent system understands how to deal with software (Runtime's position on this is: god, no) the CNCF's new prior-art bounty suggests that enterprise tech needs to be prepared for a new round of patent trolling as older companies sell off their assets.

"Anytime you have a successful open source project that is used everywhere, people are going to come out of the woodwork to take advantage of it," Aniszczyk said during the press conference.
And as struggling enterprise software companies make business decisions to close off parts of previously open-sourced code to prevent others from monetizing it, they could be more susceptible to patent claims that could otherwise be defended by an organization with the deep pockets of the Linux Foundation.
The long-term answer to this problem will require reform of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which I'll bet a ticket to KubeCon 2025 does not get solved by the incoming administration by this time next year.
Until a real solution for patent trolling arrives, open-source contributors should preserve their notes and documents.

Scale issue

As early adoptees of generative AI pointed out the flaws in the technology over the last couple of years, its backers promised that obstacles like hallucinations would disappear as the technology advanced. Turns out, however, that major model providers are starting to acknowledge that they may not be able to improve the performance of their models at the cadence they have delivered in the past.

Bloomberg added to reporting from The Information and others this week suggesting that future large-language models will not be able to deliver the same increase in performance that previous releases did upon moving to a new generation. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all dealing with this problem, which means "even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models, or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade," Bloomberg reported.

Technology advances don't always move as uniformly up and to the right as their champions would like you to believe, but the lack of progress is definitely a concern for just about everyone in enterprise tech that has invested heavily in the future of generative AI. Still, chipmakers managed to keep going after the increasing limitations of Moore's Law closed off the easiest route to improved performance, and model providers might be going through a similar transition.

Enterprise moves

Tony Alika Owens is the new CEO of Amperity, joining the customer-data platform company after 20 years in sales and operations leadership roles at LivePerson, Salesforce, and Oracle.

David Faugno is the new co-CEO of 1Password, joining Jeff Shiner in the corner office after serving as president and COO of the company since last year.

Ravi Narula is the new CFO of SymphonyAI, after serving as CFO at Aura and Certinia over the last several years.

The Runtime roundup

CoreWeave raised an additional $650 million in new funding from Cisco and Pure Storage that will allow existing shareholders to cash out after a meteoric 18-month rise.

AMD laid off about 4% of its workforce as it chases enterprise AI business, which appears to have been bad news for those working on its consumer products.

AWS will no longer offer its Snowcone Edge hardware appliances, which were designed to make it easier to move data into its cloud, as part of a larger culling of services under new CEO Matt Garman.

Small-modular reactor startup Oklo said it has received commitments from two data-center companies to produce up to 750 megawatts of power in the U.S., adding to the growing interest in nuclear power from enterprise tech.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!