evi@cs.Colorado.EDU (Evi Nemeth) (05/29/91)
I was the author of the questions in the recent Usenix membership survey about software patents. In the introduction to that section of the survey the example that was given was the patent on the concept of an include file. The article that I got this information from was apparently jumping to conclusions. Richard Stallman has researched this topic and here are his conclusions: ------------------------ From: rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) I traced down the source of the story of a patent on include files. It turns out that the patent belongs to IBM, but include files are not what it covers. (At least, I don't think it would cover them.) The patent is titled "Merging of Documents". It covers displaying part of one document within the display of another, in response to a kind of cross-reference. This is, of course, a basic idea of hypertext. So many hypertext systems would infringe this patent. This patent might be invalid because of Ted Nelson's book on hypertext. However, it may cost a lot of money to prove this. The patent number is 4,674,040. It was issued in 1987. ------------------------ -evi