What to do if you're involved in code-dispute litigation (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

What to do if you're involved in code-dispute litigation (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 4, 2004 19:54 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: What to do if you're involved in code-dispute litigation (NewsForge) by mmarq
Parent article: What to do if you're involved in code-dispute litigation (NewsForge)

I think you need to take some time before posting. I could hardly understand your sentence structure or ideas.

There are several reasons to follow these issues and not all dealing with 'patents'.

But first to answer your question: Are all ideas patented? Probably.
You are guilty until proven innocent in many courts when dealing with patents. Not much you can do that other than live the life of the Amish (although their 16th century 'buttons' have probably been repatented by some company).

The main reason is that sloppy projects are trouble is due to code getting put into the project illegally. Putting in GPL licensed code into a BSD licensed project doesnt mean that the code is all GPL'd. It means that you have to figure out what code is not licensed correctly, and removing it. Taking that code you found on a download site that belonged originally to Cisco doesnt mean its ok to put it in your project. It means that your code is now ready for a criminal and civil suit.

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