Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--5af79f-However, many patent holders w/en

However, many patent holders will offer you a chance of a license. But it will cost you dearly. The owners of the natural order recalculation patent were demanding five percent of the gross sales of every spreadsheet. And that, I was told, was the cheap pre-lawsuit price. If you insisted on fighting over the matter, they were going to charge more. Now you could, I suppose, sign a license like that for one patent, you could do it for two, you could do it for three. But what if there are twenty different patents in your program, and each patent holder wants five percent of the gross sales? What if there are twenty one of them? Then you are pretty badly screwed. But actually business people tell me that two or three such patents would be such a big burden that they would make the company fail in practice, even if in theory it might have a chance.