[p2p-hackers] Online Codes

[Michael Parker]

Hi all,

Does anyone know what happened to the "Online Codes" Sourceforge 
project, listed at http://sourceforge.net/projects/onlinecodes? I'm 
asking here for two reasons: First, because Online Codes [1, 2] would be 
a great tool in peer-to-peer applications, so I thought someone here 
might have followed the project while it was still active. Second, I've 
written a solid library implementation of the Online Codes 
encoding/decoding algorithm described in the aforementioned papers. 
Alas, only after I implemented it did I find out that the authors' 
company, Rateless, had patented it (or, so they allude to on their web 
site www.rateless.com, Digital Fountain owned the IP). I was thinking of 
releasing it under the GPL, but now that I've discovered patents are 
involved that seems like a very bad idea. So I was wondering if the 
Online Codes project broke up because of this, and whether I would get 
sued into oblivion if I ever made this code available? IANAL, but is it 
illegal to write such code and distribute it as a library on the net 
(after all, it is straight from their papers) to elucidate how the 
algorithm works, or only illegal to include the library in any working 
software program?

Regards,
Michael Parker

[1] http://www.rateless.com/oncodes.pdf
[2] http://www.rateless.com/msd.ps