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Why the downvotes? This person is describing a real problem with dealing with staff patent attorneys. This is real life.
by hive_mind 10y ago
Why the downvotes? This person is describing a real problem with dealing with staff patent attorneys. This is real life.
- clishem 10y agoIf you think it's a constructive comment I'll be writing a bot that scans pages posts on HN, looks on the page for a GitHub link and complains about the license used. Doesn't matter if it's GPL, MIT, Apache, I'll just write some generic comment complaining about each license.
- nikcub 10y agoThere is no complaint to be made about Apache or MIT outside of ideology, while there are some developers who simply aren't aware that they're excluding a large part of their potential user base when selecting a copyleft license
- zenlikethat 10y agoSince the license of this library is MIT and the poster mentions patent attorneys I'd guess they aren't worried about licensing. They're worried about getting sued by Microsoft, Google, etc. for patent infringement.
- mason55 10y agoHost on Azure and use Microsofts patents against the when they sue you
- euroclydon 10y agoHi. Certainly, my comment would be applicable to any open source library. But my intent was not to say that OSS software is difficult to get by patent attorneys. Rather I was attempting an inside joke with kindred spirits who have submitted OSS libs to their company's attorneys for patent infringement. What they seem to do is hire a grunt to do a naive word search match on the patent database. So I was saying, "just imagine the number of results that will come back for 'spreadsheet' or 'Excel'".