This sounds like a call for the FOSS community to produce a phonetic similarity algorithm that is not encumbered by patents. Metaphone 3 is patent-pending, and the author obviously intends to profit from it.
Porting the code released with BSD license would effectively just be donating the work to a private individual. Be glad that the guy was good enough to warn people ahead of time, instead of submerging a patent submarine and surfacing after someone creates a big payday for him.
The idea itself, to determine phonetic rules from spelling quirks in English, is non-patentable, but the specific rules he formulated may be. Anyone else could spend "thousands of hours" creating their own rules. We already have a few in the public domain, such as the "i before e" rule, where the "ei" in "neighbor and weigh" is phonetically an "a", which implies that "-eigh-" is the spelling pattern, which also holds in "eight" and "neigh".
The patent application linked numerous times in this thread is listed as abandoned after being rejected for non-patentability. Type the application or publication number into [1] for details.
Mark Rosenfelder has a pretty impressive attempt at computerizing English spelling (with a set of rules and their justifications published in human-readable and machine-readable forms).
Porting the code released with BSD license would effectively just be donating the work to a private individual. Be glad that the guy was good enough to warn people ahead of time, instead of submerging a patent submarine and surfacing after someone creates a big payday for him.
The idea itself, to determine phonetic rules from spelling quirks in English, is non-patentable, but the specific rules he formulated may be. Anyone else could spend "thousands of hours" creating their own rules. We already have a few in the public domain, such as the "i before e" rule, where the "ei" in "neighbor and weigh" is phonetically an "a", which implies that "-eigh-" is the spelling pattern, which also holds in "eight" and "neigh".
See? Free head start for FOSS.