This has got me thinking about what patent protection REALLY means. In order to understand it better I queried the uUnited States Patent and Trademark Office for all patents that could be related to computer software. This is what the database came up with: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q57D6393E To be fair, some of these may be about hardware. I queried for patents in any of the following classes: 700 - Data processing: generic control systems or specific applications 702 - Data processing: measuring, calibrating, or testing 703 - Data processing: structural design, modeling, simulation, and emulation 704 - Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language translation, and audio compression/decompression 705 - Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or cost/price determination 706 - Data processing: artificial intelligence 707 - Data processing: database and file management or data structures 708 - Electrical computers: arithmetic processing and calculating 709 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomputer data transferring 710 - Electrical computers and digital data processing systems: input/output 711 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory 712 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: processing architectures and instruction processing (e.g., processors) 713 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: support 714 - Error detection/correction and fault detection/recovery 715 - Data processing: presentation processing of document, operator interface processing, and screen saver display processing 717 - Data processing: software development, installation, and management 718 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: virtual machine task or process management or task management/control 719 - Electrical computers and digital processing systems: interprogram communication or interprocess communication (ipc) 726 - Information security A complete list of patent classes may be found here: http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/selectnumwithtitle.htm If you want to search for patents granted in a single class or set of classes, you can go here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm and enter a big fat query of the form: "ccl/700/$ or ccl/702/$ ..." Naturally before you release any code you'll want to have a quick look through the relevant patents to make sure you're not infringing. Saill -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org