First of all, remember that the ACS Tcl version is GPL'd, and our warnings to developers to isolate themselves from ACS Java 4.6 and later versions is to insulate our project from the ...
(I've been waiting for the right time to say this)
potentially viral effect of the ADPL on GPL'd code.
As far as your more general concerns regarding other parties patenting your, or our, ideas there's really no defense other than money. In the first place, money enough to patent those ideas you think are patentable (and as much as I detest software patents, having
grown up and developed and sold innovative software back when there was no such thing available, this is the safest thing to do). If you
patent your ideas yourself you're free to charge whatever you want in license fees, for instance zero dollars for GPL'd use and infinite dollars for other use.
Of course, there's that (damned) money issue to deal with.
The other course is to plunge forward, document what you do, and if
someone nastily tries to patent not only the idea (patents really are,
in theory at least, more precise than that) but your implementation sketch, rely on the courts to give you the satisfaction of shooting stuff down.
IMO eventually something like the FSF pledge to defend GPL issues will need to evolve to scuttle bogus wide-ranging patents, i.e. an independent source of funding and legal resources needs to evolve to tackle this horrible weapon against the use of commonly-known techniques in software (patents are supposed to apply only to true innovation, the Patent Office simply doesn't have the expertise to sift the chaff from the wheat today, which is why the patent issue is at a semi-crisis state).
Still, my private advice is to more or less ignore it regarding aD.
They're not out to screw us over and the big-picture patent issue is one which none of us here (including aD) have enough money to buy a place at the table.
(if anyone here can tap such funds, please e-mail me privately, we can probably set you up with your own CVS tree to store your legal briefs :)
