Don't do shady deals with trolls then? Or, if that's not possible, at least do them in a way that grants downstream recipients of your software the same patent

Don't do shady deals with trolls then? Or, if that's not possible, at least do them in a way that grants downstream recipients of your software the same patent rights that you got from the deal. There is precedent for the latter. When Red Hat paid off the Firestar troll, it negotiated a patent license for all recipients of the software, including upstream and derivative versions. Discouraging individual patent deals with a troll while leaving the rest of the community (from whose software you benefit) vulnerable doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.