[2012-12-17 11:21:50 +0100] Pierre Schmitz:
The only thing we can care about is the license. If it's free software or we have permission to distribute it, I don't see any problem here.
Sure; why bother abiding by the law? You may live in Germany but what you do on overseas servers such as gerolde still falls under US law.
If we would accept software patents as valid we would not be able to ship any package.
Not all patents are equal: many are obvious trolls (easy to invalidate, e.g. because of existing prior art); some however are serious. How do we spot these? Well, by doing the least we can do: listening to upstream... If a specific piece of software is subject to sufficient patent doubt for upstream developers to bother coming up with a less encumbered version, it seems plain unreasonable not to go for the latter... -- Gaetan