No offense taken, as long as we discuss the issues and not each other then I'm fine with discussing whatever views you wish to represent.
"Treble damages, in law, is a term that indicates that a statute permits a court to triple the amount of the actual/compensatory damages to be awarded to a prevailing plaintiff, generally in order to punish the losing party for willful conduct... For example, such damages may be awarded by a court in the United States for... willful patent infringement" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ).
As there are literally millions of patents, many patent lawyers advise their clients to avoid knowing what things are patented as that mere research can later be used against them to show that they had willfully ignored the patents they knew existed. If you think that encouraging willful ignorance is ridiculous then you should read some of the other patent-related laws that exist. Patent law is very often counter to people's common sense of how they think patents should work. If patents did indeed function as laypeople think they should then patents wouldn't be the contentious issue that they are nowadays.
Anyone in any field can suddenly become aggressive regardless of their past actions or statements. However, statistically, people who are armed and tell others that they will be aggressive are much more likely to do so than people who have no weapons and make no such claims. If a patent lawyer says that he will "assert his patents" if you act in a certain way then he is both armed for the task and taking the aggressive posturing that makes him likely to sue.
That doesn't mean that SpotOn3D is the biggest potential patent threat to OpenSim, IBM and Intel both hold many more relevant patents. However, those big open-source developers have, to my knowledge, never made patent threats against small entities or used their patents aggressively against anything but other mega-corporations. SpotOn3D is unique in that regard in the OpenSim ecosystem.
There are many companies around the world that do evil things that hurt people. The fact that their employees livelihood depends on those companies doesn't mean that they should get a free pass to continue doing what they do. Companies that hurt the ecological/business/legal/ethical/etc. environment should change their ways or go out of business. It is up to consumers to decide what violations they are willing to overlook and what violations are too big to go unchallenged. They can then use their money to promote the kind of corporate behaviors they would like to see become the norm.
This really has nothing to do with SpotOn3D per say but rather with how consumers can convince companies to act in ways that benefit the consumers and not just the companies' share holders. When it comes to OpenSim's continued development, people can convince companies to contribute to, instead of threaten, OpenSim by using their wallets in ways that reward companies that help the common good and punish companies that don't.