If you live in the European Union, please consider signing the petition to forbid software patents in this area. Software patents threaten free/open source software development by individuals and small companies because they introduce the danger to accidentally infringe one of the trivial patents with the risk of immense legal costs and dammage claims. Only large multi-national companies can afford the costs of a legal department that continuously checks against the huge number of patents and defends against (potentially) unjustified patent infringement claims.