Re: rough first impressions

[James Knight <jknight@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 09:07  AM, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
> That is simply your opinion, and not the law as it stands now. Whether  
> one thinks Intentional Software either deserves, or doesn't deserve to  
> have exclusive rights to these features, as a matter of law, they do.  
> The rather expensive burden of proving otherwise would be on anyone  
> who violated those patents. That which you see as prior art, might  
> very well be ruled by the courts to be less specific previous work,  
> which would avail you little, or not at all in a legal fight.

While it's all well and good that you're claiming "innocent messenger"  
status, the fact is that you're trying to convince people not to  
develop features which are patented. If you actually took the view that  
you won't write any software that is covered by a patent, it would be  
utterly impossible to write any software *at all*.

Perhaps you transmit binary data between computers? Uh oh, then you're  
surely violating this one. Better stop that!

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- 
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/ 
srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4956809.WKU.&OS=PN/4956809&RS=PN/4956809

On a non-software note, have a swingset? Perhaps you/your kids violate  
this one:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- 
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/ 
srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6368227'.WKU.&OS=PN/6368227&RS=PN/6368227

Down this road lies madness. It's not worth anyone's time to worry  
about patent violations unless it's forced upon you. Would you tell  
your kids not to swing sideways just because you might get sued? That's  
ridiculous.

*Especially* in the particular specific we're talking about here. We  
have an open source, free language essentially owned by MIT. We're  
talking about a feature whereby you can choose to use a 'verbose' mode  
or a 'brief' mode. This essentially boils down to a *pre-parser* (!!).  
MIT has IP lawyers, and MIT has patents, at least one of which I have  
no doubt Intentional Software violates. I would be extremely surprised  
if suing MIT to try to force GOO not to include a pre-parser could be  
anywhere near successful.

Anyhow, this thread is greatly off topic now, so I'll stop posting now.  
I liked the original thread better.

James