Re: XEmacs: ORDINARY_LINK and linux
On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Valdis Kletnieks mused:
On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 13:38:22 +0900, SL Baur said:
> By the way, I hope someone has already removed the JPEG support in
> XEmacs. This patent crap makes me want to puke.
It may be wise to wait for a little while before actually doing so. It
would Really Suck if we yanked the support as a knee-jerk reaction to
some company's patent claims, only to have to put it back once it's found
invalid (or the company finds it's infeasible to actually deal with the
licensing issues).
Indeed.
(Note that the IJG claims that the patent does not apply, and it's only a
US patent anyway.)
Remember - some bozo might manage to get the patent office to not
notice
that there's prior art for the concept of separate pre- and post- increment
operations, and try to collect licensing fees for all C programs that
use both ++i and i++ before the patent is invalidated. ;)
Been done for many similar concepts. It doesn't take very much to
convince the US patent office of lack of prior art :(
--
`There's something satisfying about killing JWZ over and over again.'
-- 1i, personal communication