You're correct--I was thinking patent issues rather than trademark issues.
Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
Here's the most important thing I'm going to say in this message:
IANAL, so everything I write below is speculation.
Michael Welter writes:
Rude or not, I'm posing a question to the community. If our
developments do infringe on someone's patent, who are they going to sue?
Me? You? FIC? All of us?
A minor point -- of course, we're talking about trademarks here, not
patents.
Let's say we had a multi-touch display, and 20 developers developed some
scrolling gestures. Who is Apple going to sue?
Seems like the normal action in a lawsuit is to go after everybody in
sight, especially the ones with deep pockets. So I'd guess, at a
minimum, the twenty developers and FIC.
But... it's awfully hard to prove damages when something is
distributed for free. And the current patent situation is so chaotic
that nobody really knows who is infringing on what patents, nor
whether those patents would be found valid if the lawsuit happened.
That's especially true now that the (US) Supreme Court has demanded
that the lower courts apply a less ridiculous standard for obviousness
than they had been. Combine that with some really big guns out there
(especially IBM) donating several hundred patents with a no-sue
pledge, contingent on people using those patents not suing free
software developers, and I'm not worried about infringing patents.
I have a lot more respect for a real trademark owner (as opposed to
the various scum out there who have tried stunts like registering a
trademark on Linux before Torvalds did) than I do a possible patent.
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