You know what really gets me going lately?  Sensationalistic
journalists looking to muddy the waters of Open Source.  Take, for
instance, this article titled “Will Patent Battles End Free Linux.”  What a joke.

First,
patent issues have been going on for decades between proprietary
companies.  Heck, most lawyers know this already and many have
admitted that the only reason that Open Source projects are getting
targeted is that they play by a more open strategy to begin with. 
Many of the patent holding companies rely also on the sheer volume of
patents in the system, and the ambiguity of most of those patents, to
prevent an adequate search of patented technology so that they can lay
in wait while somebody else implements “their” idea, only then moving
in to say “hey, that’s mine, you have to pay me to use that,” after
much time, energy and (usually) money has already been spent on the
effort.

Anyway, I just wanted to point this out for what it
is.  Patent Battles are a problem with Business and Ethics, not
with proprietary versus open source.  I would venture to say that
at least as many, if not more, proprietary projects trample on the IP
rights of others and simply never get reported due to a lack of
informational access and the cost and risk of exposing potential
offenses.  Way to play your ethics cards people, way to go…

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