xanthian@zorch.sf-bay.org (Kent Paul Dolan) (02/24/91)
--text follows this line-- **** Note newsgroups, followup line!!!! [AT&T legal slime is harassing X11 users over the patented "backing store" method of saving obscured parts of overlapping windows, with an offer of "licenses". Original legal letter is posted in gnu.g++.announce.] Pretty disgusting; if you read Pike's original paper, it is an incredibly generic description of an algorithm that any any second year grad student would be itching to take apart and make into something useful. It is link list based when it obviously needs to be hashed for speed, for example, with any commercially interesting number of windows in use, and it is a self evident extension of prior manual cut and paste art and cel animation art. This is nevertheless an incredible threat to the whole workstation industry; the AmigaOS system at which I type uses Pike's algorithm (unmodified, from the relatively doggy speed of it), for example. I read recently elsewhere on the net about a firm whose only business is buying up idle patents from people who aren't using them, and suing "patent violators" for the funds that are their profits. Looks like AT&T has joined the lists of those who can't produce commercially competitive products, and so have decided to recover operating expenses by suing those who can but don't maintain big suites of lawyers. Maybe this is a big enough item to finally gather enough amicus curae to return the patent rules to the ones in the law: you can't license breathing, and you can't patent algorithms and other laws of nature. I wonder if this falls far enough back in time that AT&T was still under court strictures not to be in the computer business, and so could be defended as owned by phone customers (essentially, the public) rather than the phone company, like Unix should be? I'm not a great fan of Copyleft, but its merits are starting to grow on me. Now if only shareware returned adequate living expenses. Kent, the man from xanth. <xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>