"I'd rather not touch anything which involves patents at all."
Unfortunately, that's not something you can reasonably expect, ever. Mike Pall made a statement about the IP of LuaJIT [1], and made the point that while his own contributions are freely donated to the public domain...
"I cannot guarantee it to be free of third-party IP however. In fact nobody can. Writing software has become a minefield and any moderately complex piece of software is probably (unknowingly to the author) encumbered by hundreds of dubious patents."