No one would have predicted that three once-fierce adversaries in the long-running patent wars would ever find ourselves speaking with one voice about how to end them.

But that’s what’s happening. Ira Blumberg is the patent chief at top-10 smartphone maker Lenovo, and an influential critic of patent licensing abuses. Boris Teksler is the former licensing chief at Apple Inc. and current CEO of Conversant, one of the non-practicing entity (NPE) patent licensing firms that have been a target of Blumberg’s criticism. And I’m the president of Swiss-neutral patent pool operator Via Licensing, and I’ve criticized companies on both sides of the patent wars for their gamesmanship, lack of transparency and litigiousness.