This has been all over various news sites as a judge in East Texas ruled against Google for patent infringement and has deemed Google responsible for a $5 Million USD fine. Although never a good thing when patent lawsuits start being thrown around, my take is this actually might be a good situation for BSD due to it's licensing model. It's in its history that BSD went through a lot of legal problems of its own with AT&T, which resulted i(as I recall) in the rewrite of the Unix system to 4.4 BSD-Lite. Thoughts?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04..._linux_patent/