Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 02:01:04PM -0700, Rob Cameron wrote: >> u8u16-0.9 is available as open source software under an OSL 3.0 license >> at http://u8u16.costar.sfu.ca/ > > On second thought, I will not offer any further advice on this. The > website refers to "patent-pending technology". Software patents are > fundamentally wrong and unless you withdraw this nonsense you are an > enemy of Free Software, of programmers, and users in general, and > deserve to be ostracized by the community. Even if you intend to > license the patents obtained freely for use in Free Software, it's > still wrong to obtain them because it furthers a precedent that > software patents are valid, particularly stupid patents like "applying > vectorization in the obvious way to existing problem X". > > Sorry for the harsh language but this is what you should expect when > you ask for advice from the Linux/Free Software community on > leveraging patents against them.
I downloaded the source, but I agree with your concerns and will not look further. Note that the OSL 3.0 license contains discussion about patents, and give us some rights to the patented technology. It is not clear to me whether the author intended this. I have to wonder where this technology would be relevant. Converting between UTF-8 and UTF-16 is a very quick operation even if implemented fairly poorly. Does anyone know where this operation is a serious bottleneck worth optimizing? I'd like to see such analysis. Remember, "premature optimization is the root of all evil"... /Simon -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
