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Brooklyn, NY
Aaron Williamson is an attorney at Tor Ekeland, P.C., where he counsels software companies, startups, and other technology-focused clients on business transactions, intellectual property issues, regulatory compliance, and related matters. Previously, he worked as in-house counsel at IEEE and as a staff attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he advised community free and open source software projects.
Authored Comments
eMBee: in this case, the company that produced the GPL'd software (XimpleWare) *does* have patents related to the software. If they're valid, anyone who uses the software needs a license (or a reason why XimpleWare should be estopped from asserting its patents against them).
While most of GNU is probably written by people who do not own patents, large portions of Linux were contributed by developers working for companies that do own patents, including many on Linux. IBM, for example, is a significant contributor to Linux and also owns huge numbers of patents. The same is true of many of the top corporate contributors to Linux: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/google-and-samsun…