Z:gnu-www-ja-software-literary-patents--e9c9a3-Just as one novel could run af/en

Just as one novel could run afoul of many different literary patents at once, one program can be prohibited by many different patents at once. It is so much work to identify all the patents that appear to apply to a large program that only one such study has been done. A 2004 study of Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, found 283 different US software patents that seemed to cover it. That is to say, each of these 283 different patents forbids some computational process found somewhere in the thousands of pages of source code of Linux. At the time, Linux was around one percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. How many patents might there be that a distributor of the whole system could be sued under?