[jariel]

I'm not a lawyer, and I was not involved, other than I knew there was a many-years-long legal action regarding branding against another company with whom we had otherwise a really good relationship.

My point is not about branding or lawyers, it's about risk.

Said company gave up a huge amount of money to patent trolls, and their lawyers were empowered to mitigate risk, with the backing of the CEO, their rationality being: "We make a huge amount of over here, why on earth would we allow that to be risked by speculative activity over there?" which is not entirely irrational, it just depends on implementation.

Everything is so gray, it's so hard to tell. Consider that we have no idea how open-source software licensing will work out because it hasn't been really pushed through the court system, and how limiting that ambiguity is for the entire industry.