On Sep 16, 2009, at 1:56 PM, M.B.Jr. wrote:
Hi list,
I've recently had access to this document, written by the "United
States Patent and Trademark Office" (USPTO) which basically tries to
ban software patents.
The memorandum is here:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/2009-08-25_interim_101_instructions.pdf
the case is,
I'm really interested in reading your opinions of what this could mean
to optional OpenPGP ciphers like IDEA.
Whether this means IDEA is okay or not patent-wise, I have a slightly
different take on this: who cares about IDEA at this point? IDEA was
good back in the 90s and PGP 2.x. It's 2009 now, and we have better
ciphers than IDEA, a massive installed software base that doesn't use
IDEA, and nobody is suffering for the lack of IDEA. If IDEA was
suddenly not patented, none of this would change.
David
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