Ian Paterson wrote:

Now that the cat is pretty much out of the bag, the introduction of the
JEP should probably be rewritten  so people can 'get' the underlying
innovative idea easily on first reading. Apologies to everyone here for
not doing that from the start.

Agreed.

Please understand how tempting it was to
either patent the technique, or just to keep it secret, instead of
publishing it freely.

Just to be fully clear, this JEP emerged originally in the brain of Dave Smith (who was then working for Jabber Inc.), and after some conversations between the two of us I wrote up versions 0.1 and 0.2 of the JEP. Ian came in at version 0.3 and has much improved the JEP since then, but if he had decided to patent a similar technique rather than contribute to the JEP, he would have patented his own technique and the JEP would have proceeded independently. Thankfully he decided to go the open route because the results are pretty powerful. :-)

Peter

--
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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