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

Ask Slashdot: I'm hungry (and other questions)

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward writes "Once again I woke up today and found that I was hungry. This happens nearly every day. I know there must be something I can do about it, but I have been unable to find anything at Source Forge to help me. So my question to the gigantic Slashdot brain trust is this: What do you do when you are hungry and more importantly, is it open source? If it is not OSS, are there any copyright or patent issues that need to be dealt with? Also, is Google or Apple involved in any way? One more question: What degree should I get?"

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.

Keeping up appearances

[Tannii]

Regardless of whether the Goverments can be sued or not, in an instance such as this, particularly here in Australia I think they would be using the "we could be sued" line as an excuse not to migrate. Firstly, with the M$ propaganda they probably believe switching to OSS will cost more in the long run and secondly because they want to keep up appearences that they have shot themselves in the foot as much as they have the rest of the country by accepting the US IP laws as part of the "FTA."

I do believe that the Australian Capital Territory Govt has introduced legislation that calls for any new projects to look at OSS alternitives first in all territory related matters. However, being a territory and not a state, the federal government has the power to veto this law at any time.

It is a sad state of affairs that so much of the tax payers money is being used to pay for software licences, when there are free open alternatives. Particularly when in numerous cases they are using off the shelf products that aren't quite what they need but are the closest thing on offer, resulting in hacks and work arounds that are costing more money in govenment employee's wages.

But hey, it's only the tax payer and most of them think that Windows is the best, most secure and most cost effective operating system anyway, so what's the problem?!