> pending and granted in the project's areas of development. By doing
> this, in the worst case you remain ignorant, and later get a cease and
> desist letter. If you start looking for things, you implicitly
Has anybody thought about how you'd handle a C&D in terms of communicating
to users? If somebody at Bob's House of IP Enforcers sends someone on the
PG team a C&D that says Feature XYZ violates their patent, and it is found
to be true by the PG team - then what?
If we imagine just a little further and say that there are various
commercial and open source projects, in which the availabilty of Feature
XYZ is ingrained into the system - they can't function without it - then
what?
If PGDG communicated the C&D, then commercial interests could point to the
problem and say "that's why you don't use Open Source!" Those who have
knowledge of how things actually are would know that it would be an
indictment of the patent system itself, but the situation would be one
more tool in the bag of tricks of those who want to discourage the use of
Open Source in general and PG in particular.
I know, preaching to the choir - but is the philosophical issue something
we need to hash out and plan for?
Thoughts?
Cheers,
-Josh Kramer
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