[denzquix]

"I'd rather not touch anything which involves patents at all."

Unfortunately, that's not something you can reasonably expect, ever. Mike Pall made a statement about the IP of LuaJIT [1], and made the point that while his own contributions are freely donated to the public domain...

"I cannot guarantee it to be free of third-party IP however. In fact nobody can. Writing software has become a minefield and any moderately complex piece of software is probably (unknowingly to the author) encumbered by hundreds of dubious patents."

[1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html

[dllthomas]

And you can avoid software which you know is patent encumbered. Even if I'm stuck walking through a minefield, it makes sense to avoid stepping in the couple places I know there are mines.

[belorn]

What you can do to minimize the risk of patent issues is to only distribute the software where software patents are not granted. EU for example is to my knowledge somewhat safe, through not completely.