When it comes to software patents, 99 percent of them are bunk. I agree that patents are necessary to let new ideas flourish, but the concept has gone way too far. And especially so in computers. People should get 2-3 years on any patent to give them time to move ahead of the competition. After that, it should be fair game.
Check out this web site on the topic: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Osapa ____________________________________ Conan C. Albrecht, Ph.D. Information Systems Department Brigham Young University Email: co...@warp.byu.edu Phone: +1-801-805-1615 Web/Blog: http://warp.byu.edu/ On Dec 12, 2008, at 16:27, has wrote:
Hey folks, Look what I ran across today: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=%28scripting+AND+bridge%29.TTL.&OS=ttl/(scripting+and+bridge)&RS=TTL/(scripting+AND+bridge)Still making my own mind up if I should be worried or amused by it. Not being familiar with the US patent system though, I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts.Do companies like Apple automatically file patents on everything they write, regardless of whether or not it's actually novel [1] or even correct [2]?How concerned should third-party developers of very similar products (e.g. me) be?Does the US patent office check for prior art themselves before deciding if an application is patent-worthy, or is it contingent on the patent submitter and/or general public to provide examples or prior art? (And if the latter, how is it done?)Cheers, has[1] e.g. The number of original concepts in Scripting Bridge - or appscript, for that matter - wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp. Between Frontier, Mac::Glue, gensuitemodule, JavaScriptOSA, aeve, appscript and any other AE bridges I've forgotten, not to mention the myriad ORM bridges out there that do similar things, I think the territory is pretty well covered. The only noticeably new wrinkle that I can think of in SB is its selective automatic dispatching of 'get' events as determined by what the reference is pointing at (an object attribute vs. a one-to-one/one-to-many relationship), although that might've appeared first in RubyOSA.[2] The bit about SB performing significantly better than prior art is BS. ObjC appscript has pretty much the same performance characteristics when building and sending events and unpacking replies. And all appscript implementations are faster at creating application objects - significantly so in the case of large, complex applications such as InDesign (15 sec for SB [3] vs 0.2 sec for py- appscript the last time I checked).[3] Via Python+PyObjC as sdp just puked when I tried to create an InDesign.h header so I could try it in ObjC.-- Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC: http://appscript.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
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_______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
