Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
That's right, but it doesn't help any of us anything. The costs of defending against a patent claim (even if the claim can eventually be overturned) are much to high to bear for anybody, but major corporations. In other words, it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong if you can't pay the legal bill. This is not just theory as a fair number of mobile app developer recently found out:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/05/lodsys-sues-7-app-developers-in-east...
Yep, patents are a bitch for small independant developers stuck between Apple's onerous AppStore conditions and patent trolls like Lodsys. However, for open source projects like GHC, there are a number of organisations like the Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ that provide (at least some) patent defense for open source projects. Its also possible for open source projects to 'design around' patent issues. For instance there was a patent on the VFAT file format implementaion in the Linux kernel that was avoided by careful reading of the patent and working around the patents specifics: http://lwn.net/Articles/338981/ Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/