Re: patents on Frets on Fire, Pydance, StepMania and such games

[Jon Dowland <lists@alcopop.org>]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 11:22:58AM +0100, Miriam Ruiz wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway, from Red Hat, announced [1] that
> Fedora won't be including any game of the kind of Frets on
> Fire, Stepmania, pydance, digiband, or anything of the
> kind of DDR or Guitar Hero, due to patent concerns [2].
snip
> Any thoughts on that?

Disappointing for Redhat/Fedora users :-(

I'd not worry about it unless we actually received a legal
threat. The patent sounds like something which would be very
easy to establish prior art for, I'm *sure* there were loads
of games like that for the Amiga, etc.

I think this is in-line with the policy the FTP masters use
for stuff, although I do not speak for the FTP masters.



-- 
Jon Dowland