Mahesh T. Pai wrote: > MJ Ray said on Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 05:18:22PM +0100,: > > > If there are no active patents covering the software, > > Patent owners' policies may change. Patents are patents, actively > enforced or not. If the license does not grant a patent license in > respect of the software released, people can very easily sneak in > patent time bombs into the codebase.
If the patents are crap patents which should never have been issued in the first place, and the owner is not litigious, there is no reason to pay any attention to them. The current situation is that the majority of patents on software are clearly garbage, and the majority of software is "covered" by various garbage patents of this sort. If the owner later becomes litigious in such a situation, the proper response is to contact PubPat and the EFF and fight to break the patent. Unfortunately, under current US case law, you are in a *better* defensive position in court if you haven't done *any* patent research at *all*. That's one reason why it's better to ignore all patents than to try to determine on your own which ones are potentially legitimate. :-P -- There are none so blind as those who will not see.
