How you feel about your time is exclusively your problem. If you were personally interested, motivated, or needed some resume padding, you’d probably be a community member and a volunteer in addition to a “rational economic actor” or whatever you fancy.
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btrettel|1 year ago
I've also been clear that I won't be doing that because I found patent searching to be a real grind. I think most people would agree with me on that point if they've done it. It's much harder than people here think it is. (To be clear, on something that I enjoy learning about or is relevant for a project of mine, I'm happy to search deep and for far longer than I did when I was an examiner. I can't say anything I was assigned at the USPTO was ever that interesting to me.)
I also don't view this as a public service because Cloudflare can easily afford to pay market rate. And honestly, now that I've thought more about it, this Whac-A-Mole approach likely won't stop all patent trolls. There are way too many bad patents. Trolls will just find new bad patents! The best way to stop trolls is to raise the bar on patent quality by giving examiners more time and making legal changes to raise the bar even more.
All this stuff about how I must be unaware that people have passions, aren't paid for open source, and are not "rational economic actors" is extrapolating beyond anything I've said.