When I read your note, I was sure that you had to be joking.... but you are
not generally a joking person when it comes to technical stuff. So I read
the patent, and I was sure that it must be April Fools Day... Nope, it's
August.... Well, some kind of fools are involved here...
Basically what this patent is saying is that if you give the controller
the address of the function that called it, and tell the controller to
call back the function when it is ready, and your controller is GPIB,
you owe NI royalties.
You have got to be joking!
Time to go and put in some more words in favor of Bilsky.
-Chuck Harris
John Miles wrote:
You can't copyright an instruction set. Any patent protection NI may
have had would have expired long ago.
Any sane person would think so.
There is nothing preventing anyone
that is willing to go to the development effort from making a NI
clone, and
several companies existed doing just that.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5974541/description.html
Here, the USPTO has seen fit to grant National Instruments ownership of the
general concept of a C callback function, when it happens to be used in a
GPIB interface layer. If you're in the GPIB hardware business, you cannot
release an API for your hardware that supports the ibnotify() function
without licensing this patent. Needless to say, LabVIEW requires
ibnotify().
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
