Patents Role in US/AU Gov't Use of Open Source?

An anonymous reader asks: "How do governments (esp. US and Australia) deal with possibility of a patent lawsuit from some company against a specific OSS product, which might be deployed by a given government department? Is there any danger for various (government or not for that matter) agencies being told 'not to use this or that software from now on' because some commercial company might be winning the patent battles in court against this particular piece of software? I can see how a small business may take such a risk, but government agencies in the US and Australia could be put off by possibility, since the costs associated with migrating to open source and then back would be rather extreme (note that we are not talking about Europe which has different take on Software Patents and consequently Munich case is not really a strong example in the US/AU context). Personally I do not like software patents and think that they only inhibit software development processes, but how would Slashdot community reason for government-wide adoption of OSS in view of possible trouble with patents?"

Comments

applies to closed source too

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

The sooner they recognize that the same liability exists with closed source the sooner they will realize that the software patent system is at fault.

FUD

[Kris_J]

OSS has no greater chance of being the target of a patent, or copyright, lawsuit than closed source software. In fact, any organisation can view the source and make their own risk assessment; something you can't do with closed source software.