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... And a Quick Word on Patents

Everything you know about patents from proprietary software development still applies to the world of open-source projects. Because your code is "published" when it is made available to people working on the project, any international patents required to implement the code need to be applied for beforehand and any U.S. patents need to be filed within 1 year. By contributing the source code to the project before a patent has been applied for, you may be giving up your right to patent the material, and by contributing it to the project without explicit license terms, you may be granting anyone who distributes a product based on the project the right to use your patent without compensation. Depending on the license you use, others may or may not have the right to use the source code, and the patent, in other work.

It is also possible to make source code freely available, but require people to license your patents from you before they can distribute any software based on the source code. For example, the MPEG4IP project on SourceForge,1 started by Cisco's Technology Center, provides an end-to-end system to explore MPEG-4 multimedia, but the codecs used by it are subject to patent royalties.