Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 18:45:50 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: allenc@bamboo.verinet.com (Allen Campbell) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A BSD-licensed GUI toolkit? Message-ID: <199903081845.LAA25028@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199903080109.SAA14975@bamboo.verinet.com> from "Allen Campbell" at Mar 7, 99 06:09:29 pm
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> > 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
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