The argument du jour is that every software patent is dangerous and useless, and every patent holder a potential troll. Surely it cannot be "safer" to infringe

The argument du jour is that every software patent is dangerous and useless, and every patent holder a potential troll. Surely it cannot be "safer" to infringe on Oracle's patents than on Microsoft's, yet at least Microsoft has gone to the trouble of specifying what exactly is exempt from patent claims and what isn't with that Community Promise of theirs - which by the way is legally binding under estoppel. I don't remember ever seeing anything like that from Oracle, Sun or IBM vis-a-vis Java, and it was interesting that Java was released under the GPLv2 and not v3, which would actually eliminate the threat of a patent claim on it. /This/ argument that Java and PostgreSQL and MQ implementations (check out the patents in that niche) and everything else is "more safe" than Mono is unpersuasive at best to me - in fact I'd buy it only in the case of Samba, which does have an official get out of jail free card from Microsoft.