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It depends on the license
rarsa Updated - 8th Sep 2010
You use the term "open source" instead of "Free software". Without getting into the philosophical differences I can clearly see a practical difference related to your poll. Also there is a big distinction between copyright and patents.


Some licenses guarante that the software under it is not encumbered by individual patents from contributors. (e.g. GPL, Microsoft Public License)

"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."

Some other Open Source licenses may not have the same protection so you may be assigning patents to someone that may come back and use that same patents against you.
ie8 fix

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