followup on patents

The key point is "software patents are an absurdity". Every single piece of software potentially infringes patents (where they are legal: the USA, Japan, etc.). Using (or worse: developing) software implementing ideas described in patents that are actively enforced is risky: the software may disappear anytime. Indeed, even if the patent would not hold in court, you cannot afford a patent litigation (that typically lasts for years) unless you are a multi-billion company (and even such a company prefers to acquire many patents that cost billions and sign cross-patents agreements instead of litigating). That is why Trisquel does not choose, in the default install, softwares that rely on Mono (but they are in the repositories). To not take any risk w.r.t. patents, you basically cannot use any software...

You would want to look at the GNU Project's Guidelines or Free System Distributions. It has this section on patents which states:

Patents

It is effectively impossible for free software developers and distributors to know whether or not a given piece of software infringes any patents: there are too many of them, they vary from country to country, they're often worded so as to make it hard to tell what they do or don't cover, and it isn't easy to tell which ones are valid. Therefore, we don't generally ask free system distributions to exclude software because of possible threats from patents. On the other hand, we also don't object if a distributor chooses to omit some software in order to avoid patent risk.