IANAL, but my understanding is no. Also, software patents tend to be so vague and generic that if you were to thoroughly search for anything that you might conceivably be infringing on, you'll spend a preposterous amount of time doing so, probably find not one single thing that directly applies to what you're doing, and will probably find a few thousand that don't apply but are generic enough that some lawyer might still haul you into court in east Texas, who can then claim willful infringement because of your search. I probably couldn't even write /bin/ls without stepping close to infringing on hundreds or thousands of vague, generic IP land mines planted long ago by unscrupulous lawyers who are just waiting with bated breath for someone to stumble across them so they can drag people to east Texas or (more likely) shake them down for settlement money before it goes to court.
