The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

Please also recall that hugin is primarily a frontend to tools developed
almost ten years ago (panotools, libpano, etc) by Dr. Helmut Dersch at the University of Furtwangen. A lawsuit over patents related to panoramic imaging by IPIX (now belovedly bankrupt) made him take down his pages and spend years underground with the lawyers doing the talking while others kept the sources available in a sort of ghetto existence. Development of these tools and front-ends like Hugin were enormously slowed by the FUD surrounding this at the time. Even now, Dr. Dersch's renewed presence on the web and in the development process seems gun-shy -- and who could blame him?