I have been thinking about this issue of implementing patent endangered code in the dotgnu and mono project. (the Winforms)

See : Mail1 Mail2

• You need to track who is working on that explicitly because of the danger of patents being approved. Not all people can work on all parts, depending on what country they are fron.

• People need to be warned that if they contribute to that project the thier work can be thrown out and made invalid if the patents are granted. Otherwise

• The license of patented endangered software is not GPL compatible because there are restrictions on who can work on them.

All in all what is needed, in my humple opinon is a way to mark the software as being in danger. I would suggest that the dotgnu project move all this code that is part of the MS patent application into a new project. That project will need to have a different license text on it, and have some type of access control for the commits.

I think that is the only fair way to handle the situation, otherwise you will have people who are contributing to what they think is free software, only to have the rug pulled out from under thier feet.

mike