At Mon, 5 Dec 2011 08:17:26 -0500,
Emily Lynema wrote:
> 
> 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?

I don’t think libraries have a particularly unique perspective on
this: most free/open source software projects have the same issues
with patents.

The Software Freedom Law Center has some basic information about these
issues. As I recall, the “Legal basics for developers” edition of
their podcasts is useful [1], but other editions may be helpful as
well.

Basically, the standard advice for patents is what Mike Taylor gave:
ignore them. Pay attention to copyright and trademark issues (as the
Koha problem shows), but patents really don’t need to be on your
radar.

best, Erik

1. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2011/aug/16/Episode-0x16-Legal-Basics-for-Developers/



Sent from my free software system <http://fsf.org/>.