Z:gnu-www-ja-danger-of-software-patents--f6a90a-A lawyer did a study of one pa/en

A lawyer did a study of one particular large program, namely the kernel Linux, which is used together with the GNU operating system that I launched. This was five years ago now; he found 283 different US patents, each of which appeared to prohibit some computation done somewhere in the code of Linux. At the time I saw an article saying that Linux was 0.25 percent of the whole system. So by multiplying 300 by 400 we can estimate the number of patents that would prohibit something in the whole system as being around 100,000. This is a very rough estimate only, and no more accurate information is available, since trying to figure it out would be a gigantic task.