Re: rough first impressions

On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 09:45 AM, Paul Graham wrote:

> Has any company ever
>
> attacked an open-source project over a patent infringement,
>
> legitimate or otherwise?  Never, as far as I know.  They'd
>
> bring on their heads the mother of all boycotts.

Lawsuits target entities with money, which rarely includes open source 
projects. There are other kinds of development and developers than open 
source. Patent infringement suits are quite common in the commercial 
realm.

Sorry if some people think so, but this is not flamebait. We have a 
really bad patent problem in this country, especially as regards 
software. I was just stating the obvious legal facts with regard to 
these features; they are patented. Please don't kill the messenger.

Nearly everyone here has treated me as if I'm the author of our broken 
patent system, or as if I favored the existence of software patents. I 
don't, and I don't think many people who know much about them do. But 
the reality is, these features are patented.

Raf

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
[email protected]