I am quite aware of the potential risk of being sued, but still I don't know what to do about it. Isn't this a general problem when creating (free) software? The patent you mentioned could easily be applied to Sage as well – so how do you deal with that there?
Should I contact Wolfram and explicitly ask whether they're "okay" with Mathics? Could I trust a "yes" and should I just accept a "no"? Given that I'm not a legal expert and don't have the money to hire one, should I rather take down Mathics completely to avoid any risks? On Monday, April 2, 2012 9:43:38 PM UTC+2, Volker Braun wrote: > > You can always be sued and be forced to spend a lot of time and money on > your defense, regardless of whether you are innocent or guilty. > > While there is no reasonable doubt that computer languages can't be > copyrighted, Wolfram can always use some software patent to drag anybody to > court. How about #20110004864, or "Method of Dynamically Linking Objects > Operated on by a Computational System". How can you write any computational > system without linking objects operated on? Could it possibly be more > vague? I'm pretty sure that one could find prior art here and have such a > patent suit be thrown out after spending a few years in court, but it will > cost you dearly... > > To Wolfram's defense, they haven't abused the court system. But its naive > to think that you can't be sued (for any reason). > > > > On Monday, April 2, 2012 7:30:53 PM UTC+1, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: >> >> You might run into the same problem Richard Fateman run into, with >> Wolfram >> Research threatening legal action over the use of their commands. If so, >> I'd >> remind them of the famous Borland vs Lotus case >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int%27l,_Inc. >> >> which was settled in the Supreme Court in the USA. >> >> -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
