Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote: > That's right, but it doesn't help any of us anything. The > costs of defending against a patent claim (even if the claim > can eventually be overturned) are much to high to bear for > anybody, but major corporations. In other words, it doesn't > matter if you are right or wrong if you can't pay the legal > bill. This is not just theory as a fair number of mobile app > developer recently found out: > > > http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/05/lodsys-sues-7-app-developers-in-eastern.html
Yep, patents are a bitch for small independant developers stuck between Apple's onerous AppStore conditions and patent trolls like Lodsys. However, for open source projects like GHC, there are a number of organisations like the Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ that provide (at least some) patent defense for open source projects. Its also possible for open source projects to 'design around' patent issues. For instance there was a patent on the VFAT file format implementaion in the Linux kernel that was avoided by careful reading of the patent and working around the patents specifics: http://lwn.net/Articles/338981/ Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe