Rich, I would agree that the abuse of software patents is fundamentally wrong and that patent reform is highly overdue. I am doing something about it.
However, I would prefer to see that discussion taken back to Groklaw. We have already had two rounds with respect to International Characters draft Covenant Not to Assert as well as my patent-based open source model. http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/tech-transfer.html The "obvious" application of vectorization to UTF-8 doesn't work, because UTF-8 comes in variable length chunks. Anyway, comments on obviousness and prior art is invited as part of the Community Patent Review process to which we've applied. dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ On March 15, 2007 10:27 am, Rich Felker wrote: > 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. > > Sincerely, > Rich Felker > > -- > Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ -- Robert D. Cameron, Ph.D. Professor of Computing Science Simon Fraser University -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
