That's certainly a possibility. I would prefer the occasional unjust (unjust IMHO anyway) outcome that sets nasty men free provided it also allows outcomes that allows good men from having their lives destroyed :)

My final year project for my CS degree was pretty much doing what this patent describes, and it was submitted in 2008, two years ahead of this patent being filed. I even have a conference paper (published with my project supervisor) published in the same year, so there's lots of hard evidence. I also know that there's a few other projects that could claim prior art to this patent, and precedes my own work. I'm pretty sure there's more than enough prior art in the world to blow this out of the water should it be challenged in court. Heck, I'm surprised the USPTO had the gall to allow this one through at all.

IMHO you should change that to just "Do something on the side to improve your skills and experience in the area you want to be in." :)
Even if it's the area you currently work in. If you don't love the thing you're either already working in or want to work in enough to do so, then it's the wrong thing for you.

Don't forget to add in the European laws to that. Even if the UK decided to recognise US patents, developers could still get rulings overturned in European courts.

You're mixing your Gods and throwing in a titan or two by the looks of it... :)

I'm sure they can claim that the IP agreement was just for the W7 app and these new ports are exempt from the agreement. So now they own the IP for your ports and still get 30% from the revenue of the original W7 app. They most likely also charge a 30% fee for the apps listing.

Of course, you could always use the W7 app as a litmus test for popularity and if you then think you can make some real cash, leave you MS job and then write the ports.

A lot of python 2 libs won't have too much trouble running under 3 without modifications.

They do realise that even more Internet services are not even in the US....right? Or does their jurisdiction actually extend to other countries now?

What are you talking about? Nearly every single provider has unlimited download offers. They're not usually too expensive either. This is been the case for many years.

Heck, I can't remember the last time I went to someone's house and they had a limit.

I have a sourceforge project. All I did was pull down the repo to another location and run a diff on my working repo and the one I pulled down. There were no unexpected differences. I'm struggling to see why this is so hard to understand. It's simple to figure out if your project has changed in an unexpected way. It also easy to overwrite the repository on the sourceforge server with a clean one if you are suspicious.

Seriously, an attack this public will not catch out many projects. And I fail to see how someone would be able to "prove" that a project stole code when it's been made so public that SF was compromised. Just that fact would cast a huge amount of doubt over that sort of claim. Especially when one of the developers hands over an untainted version from their home machine for inspection.

Um...each developer will have a working copy on their local machine. This is most likely to be the last known good version. A quick diff will show up the changes that they've recently made and they can verify that the differences are valid. It's really not that complicated.

If someone wants to go through the trouble of hacking the version control to the point it can propagate to the developers machine, stop them from reverting changes that may have been pulled down just before the repositories were locked down, I'm pretty sure they'd be smart enough to break into sourceforge without making such a big mess and alerting everyone. We can go around with increasingly unlikely scenarios forever but the fact is, a quick check is all that's realistically required.