Pillsbury Winthrop on free software and patents [LWN.net]

Here's a lawyergram from Pillsbury Winthrop LLP on free software and patents; the clue level is higher than one might expect. "The suggestion that users of OS software are more likely to be sued for patent infringement than those that use proprietary software, like Microsoft's does not appear supported by actual experience. It is interesting to note that while Microsoft has had several dozen patent infringement lawsuits filed against it in the past few years, none have been reported against Linux, the most popular of all [open source] programs."

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considering only the law suits might be misinterpretation

Posted Dec 16, 2004 8:41 UTC (Thu) by alexs (guest, #13637) [Link]

most open source projects are suspect of dropping their stuff
before any cost intensive law suite gets started,
therefore you will find rather few open source law suites.

you could say, patents do force open source projects to find
circumvention paths rather quickly, but on the other hand it
is not nice to go the permanent danger of beeing pushed out
of coding and code distribution any now and then
anytime a lawyer thinks he can request it - and never go to court
but leave that question open just because its not affordable to you.

so you are going to resolve the thing in code.
if you were not forced (with or without a resonable justification)
to recode your things you would have been able to advance your
project - but you are only re-designing the wheel once more
"in a different color".

-Alex.

considering only the law suits might be misinterpretation

Posted Dec 16, 2004 13:00 UTC (Thu) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

most open source projects are suspect of dropping their stuff before any cost intensive law suite gets started,

Really? First I've heard of such. Got any proof?

considering only the law suits might be misinterpretation

Posted Dec 17, 2004 18:45 UTC (Fri) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

The author of Bladeenc, a free audio encoding sourcecode, was threatened by Thomson Multimedia Inc and chose to stop publishing his work, although he wrote nothing but a computer program [ as such ].

In early 2003, Tord Jansson, developper of a streaming software called BladeEnc, wrote to a member of the European Parliament:

"I'm a professional software developer who early summer 1998 wrote a computer program that I decided to put on my homepage. The program turned out to be a tremendous success and was quickly distributed in millions of copies, obviously filling a need among many computer users. I quickly started to improve my program and release new versions. That same autumn I was contacted by a large company with a competing product, who claimed that my program infringed on certain patents they had been granted. Consulting SEPTO gave no reason to take infringement claims seriously since computer programs are not patentable as such, but in early 1999 my legal advisor explained that the legal uncertainty lately introduced by EPO would perhaps make the claims valid. That eventually forced me to stop making my program available.

Do you believe a corporation should have the right to control what computer programs I can write and publish? "