The Cloud Native Heroes Challenge
Be a Cloud Native Hero! We need your help to deter patent trolls, so we’re running some contests for a chance to win money and other prizes. Our Cloud Native Heroes Challenges are designed to get our community involved in weakening trolls’ ability to weaponize their patents against open source adopters – something we can *all* get behind! The Cloud Native Heroes Challenge contests are co-hosted by CNCF and Unified Patents, our partner in patent troll deterrence.
See below to learn more about what patent trolls are, why trolls are a threat to cloud native, how prior art can be used to defeat them, and how you can participate in this challenge and become a Cloud Native Hero.
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. Patents are meant to protect new or “novel” inventions, so the existence of “prior art” can be used to show that the patent is invalid and therefore neutralize the troll’s ability to weaponize it.
This is complicated, and likely an area new to many participants in our community. Due to the success and increasing ubiquity of cloud native, patent troll aggression towards adopters of Kubernetes and other CNCF projects is on the rise, so this is going to potentially have a widespread impact.
