For several years, a dark cloud has hung over the US open source community. Mostly triggered by the “SCO v. Everybody cases”, this cloud is the fear that some manner of patent could bring down open source projects, such as the kernel itself.
Two days ago, Red Hat, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the Free Software Foundation and several others have chimed in that it is time for patent reform by filing briefs in a case involving two guys trying to patent betting on the weather. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to over-analyze this thing, but I will provide links to all the gory details.
http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/07/red-hat-asks-federal-court-to-limit-patents-on-software/
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/34783lgl20080403.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/bilski
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/samuelsonclinic/intellectual_property_0
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080409033837121
