On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Graeme Sheppard wrote:
alan wrote:
On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Graeme Sheppard wrote:
Dear devs,
In a moment of serendipity I thought of a concept which may be
advantageous
if incorporated into the kernel. I was going to offer it to the OIN but
they responded they only consider existing patents and I don't have the
money to afford one.
How do you know it is a new idea?
The essence of the idea is simple enough that I would have heard of it.
It isn't an arcane programming trick buried deep in code.
I have heard that applied to cryptography. In almost every case someone
has thought of it already and there is a good reason it is not used.
Don't think that it is new and novel until you have done a whole lot of
research in the field. There is a reason that the Greeks considered
Hubris a sin against the Gods...
As for "defensive patents", I think of them as a time bomb waiting to
happen.
The company that files a defensive patent is rarely the problem, it is
when they go broke and someone with less ethics buys them up. The second
company does not feel bound by those previous agreements and tries to
squeeze all the money they can out of the purchaced patent pool.
It may seem like a good idea now, but it comes back to haunt the rest of
us later on down the road.
--
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
- Alan Cox
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