As Andrew once said, absolute legal safety doesn't exist. As it appears,
software patents are soon going to be a general problem for the software
world to deal with. We are even less likely to find a complete solution
to false accusations or honest slip ups.

But I'd feel much better about working in Squeak for the long term if I
were no more exposed to these risks than the next open project, rather
than having those on top of being excluded from Debian, having to always
explain how Squeak is not free, but sort of, and the specific innate
flaws of SqueakL.

Daniel

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus <schwa at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Cees raised a good point though.  Even if we were to rewrite big chunks
> of the system, we would still have to worry about 1) accusations that 
> the rewrites weren't "clean-room" 2) patents.  There's really nothing
> that we can possibly do to rid ourselves of potential legal hassles.
> 
> Joshua
> 
> 
> > 
> > Daniel