From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Mar 8 10:46:14 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from smtp01.primenet.com (smtp01.primenet.com [206.165.6.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53E8514E19 for ; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:46:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert@usr04.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp01.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA08469; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:45:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr04.primenet.com(206.165.6.204) via SMTP by smtp01.primenet.com, id smtpd008423; Mon Mar 8 11:45:52 1999 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr04.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id LAA25028; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:45:50 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199903081845.LAA25028@usr04.primenet.com> Subject: Re: A BSD-licensed GUI toolkit? To: allenc@bamboo.verinet.com (Allen Campbell) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 18:45:50 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199903080109.SAA14975@bamboo.verinet.com> from "Allen Campbell" at Mar 7, 99 06:09:29 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > How does this interact with the recent patent issued to Microsoft > > regarding style sheets? > > > > Specifically, have you obtained a license to use that patent yet? > > If not, then anything involving style sheets is pretty much a > > wasted effort, at this point. > > As you know, they have made no attempt to enforce this patent, and > if they did, Prior Art would expose this for the absurdity that it is, > which is why they won't. This is born out by the fact that Microsoft has > already publicly stated that a blanket license exists without explicit > permission for anyone using style sheets. Attempting to reverse this > at some point in the future would fail. I guess that's why the August 1980 Scientific American article on public key cryptography precluded RSA getting a patent on product-of-two-primes trap-door algorithms. Oh. Wait. It didn't. > Personally, I wish they would try to enforce it. The Justice Department > would have a field day with it, and in the end this little matter would > be cleared up. I believe they would be successful. As successful as Unisys's GIF compression algorithm enforcement regarding Terry Welch's addition to the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, or AT&T enforcement of the XOR-a-cursor and BLIT patents (both of which shouldn't have been granted, based on their obviousness). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message