--- In SunCityJodhpurLUG@..., "rohitsz2" <rohitsz2@y...>
wrote:

> but its these silly patents-holders, when they feel they are running
short of
> money, they'll hit at the linux community.

Yes you are right these silly papent holders may some day be the pain
in the back for the Linux community. Open Source Risk Management
(OSRM) has already announced that it had found 283 issued, but not yet
court-validated, software patents in the Linux kernel. The findings
are the result of a thorough Linux patent review sponsored by OSRM, a
firm that provides risk mitigation and insurance offerings to the open
source community. The review however did not find a single patent
infringement that had currently been court validated. OSRM claims that
a third of the 283 issued patents are held by Linux-friendly
corporations like Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and
Sony. The others are held by groups that may not be as friendly to
Linux, such as Microsoft. Ravicher identified Microsoft as the holder
of 27 of the patents, which he says have not been court tested.

For more on this read:
Linux's Patent Risk
By Sean Michael Kerner
at http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3389071

Regards
-Tarun