On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 11:43:51AM -0700, Rob Cameron wrote: > 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.
The use of software patents is the abuse of software patents. There is no difference. Any software patent is fundamentally wrong. > 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 No matter how much you try to "help" 'open source' (a movement to which I do not belong and do not want to belong) with patents, reinforcing the software patent system and giving it legitimacy will only hurt Free Software (and all programmers) more in the long run. Why are you pursuing patents anyway? Do you even have a reason that you're willing to share with us? > The "obvious" application of vectorization to UTF-8 doesn't work, > because UTF-8 comes in variable length chunks. Without reading your source, my "obvious" implementation would be a sort of nondeterministic model of computing the decoding in all alignments at once, and ensuring that an error flag accumulates for invalid ones to allow only the valid ones to be kept. While UTF-8 chunks are variable length, UTF-8 has the very nice property that a misaligned decode will never emulate a valid sequence. I thought this out in under a minute, being moderately experienced in writing UTF-8 decoders. It's not rocket science. I'm sure there are other approaches too. Maybe you have a somewhat better one. In any case the madness of patenting "applying vectorization to problem X", or in general "applying known tool Y to problem X", has got to stop! Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
