SCO suspends, Gartner warns

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 7:02 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
Parent article: SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Gartner has no suggestions on how anyone might verify that a given chunk of code does not violate anybody's patents.

This is a big problem, much bigger than the SCO-lunatics really. There is no way for anyone to release any code legally. Not even in principle is it possible to ensure against patent-snags.

Even if you could (you can't !) hire the required people to rea dtrough all relevant patents and compare them to your work, this would bring you nothing at all, because it's perfectly possible that a patent for something you are doing was submitted 3 years ago, but will only surface 3 years in the future.

It's an interesting set of laws where the very act of publisinh anything, regardless of how careful you are and what precautions you take make you subject to possible liabilities is supposed to stimulate new ideas and creativity.

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