[Beowulf] How do I work around this patent?

[Greg Lindahl]

> This problem is related to
> the boring world of business and IP patents. I like patents, but lately I
> wonder...

This is fairly off-topic for this list, but:

It's basically impossible to write any significant program these days
without infringing on dozens or hundreds of patents. The standard
legal advice to software startups is to not read any patents, in order
to avoid willful infringement. *If* you get sued, then it's worth
looking at the patent in question to see if you can work around it.
You can see this process in action in Linux with the argument over
workarounds for the "long names in FAT filesystems" patent.

The area you're apparenetly interested in, virtual worlds, likely has
a zillion patents with a lot of overlap. The situation is the same for
things like distributed filesystems, compilers, and perhaps MPI.

-- greg