On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 12:09:10PM -0500, Derick Centeno wrote: > I'm surprised at some people's attitude about this.
Me too! > Software, is one more category of recognized talent and achievement. > Whether it is of a cooperative corporate nature or strictly small > business, respecting and acknowledge the efforts of prior work is only > appropriate. If one is however going to use, apply, borrow or outright You're right, but it seems that you've never written a piece of software or read about the specifics of the issue. You can start here, as the mplayer front page suggests: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/industry-at-risk.html If similar patents were applicable in the music industry, there would be far less music in the world, as things as vague as simple progressions could be claimed and disallowed by others. In case you haven't noticed, there are thousands of songs with the same progressions behind them, as there are thousands of programs with the same ideas/features behind them (e.g. patent #5,175,857: Quicksort implemented using a linked list of pointers to the objects to be sorted). BTW, enforcement of art/music _copyright_ is handled differently (in most cases much more appropriately) because it doesn't involve patents. However, your e-mail program is probably infringing on several software patents *because* it acknowledges the efforts of prior work. -Neill. -- http://www.thecodefactory.org/neillm _______________________________________________ yellowdog-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'
