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On 5 December 2011 13:17, Emily Lynema <[log in to unmask]> 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? Of course this is a problem that goes much further than just open-source library software. Informed consensus seems to be that EVERY non-trivial program, whether open or closed, violates multiple software patents, and that this is pretty much inevitable due to the absurdly broad nature of many such patents. There is not much that anyone can do about this (beyond campaigning for patent reform). The whole software world gets by due to a combination of Mutually Assured Destruction (all the big companies hold massive patent arsenals that they say they won't use in a first strike) and general Not Being Evil, but the existence commerical patent trolls damages this balance. Linus Torvalds is among many who very expressly do not do any research on what patents their software might infringe on, because damages are much higher if it can be shown that you *knowingly* violated a patent. Really, the whole system is not merely broken but completely twisted. -- Mike.