Published at LXer:

Microsoft published 30,000 pages of protocol documentation, and added another 14,000 pages in the beginning of April 2008. After the publication of these documents, the Gartner Group made a advisory to the effect that Open Source developers should avoid accessing this information unless they had “rigorous processes to keep track of applicable patents”. The big question, at the end of the day: How exactly was a developer to know which protocols and functionality were patented and which were not? A few weeks ago, during my own investigation into these issues, I contacted Centrify Corp’s CEO, Tom Kemp.

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