A colleague approached me this morning with an interesting question that I
realized I didn't know how to answer. How are open source projects in the
library community dancing around technologies that may have been patented
by vendors? We were particularly wondering about this in light of open
source ILS projects, like Kuali OLE, Koha, and Evergreen. I know OLE is
still in the early stages, but did the folks who created Koha and Evergreen
ever run into any problems in this area? Have library vendors historically
pursued patents for their systems and solutions?