Sometime ago, I complained about all those survey requests that F/OSS developers receive from grad students who insist on surveying people from an academic post vs. obtaining real employment. Normally, I ignore them summarily (and then get testy when the authors send multiple notices or actively follow up to demand why I have not done my part).

However, I have recently been getting survey spam with a slightly different focus. One Marcus Dapp, a Ph.D. student somewhere in Swiss-land, is conducting an exclusive, invitation-only survey about how software patents impact free software projects. Apparently, he doesn’t read Slashdot or any of the thousands of other geek sites out there that consistently lament the topic.

Ironically, I received the survey invite due to my activity with the old TuxNES project (because it’s a Sourceforge project and it’s technically “active” — 89.76% activity last week? huh?), and not due to being on the forefront of the IP powder keg that is multimedia technology. For TuxNES and other 8-bit NES emulators, the patent situation is fairly cut and dried — the NES hardware patents expired years ago.