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Salut,

On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 02:09:42AM +0200, Tonnerre wrote:
> > I'm sure != operators have been around before His Billness was born -
> > software patents should be busted by prior art just like any other
> > patents. And as far as I remember this operator patented by M$ had some
> > specific enhancements to deal with classes so it won't affect C's !=
> > anyway.

Oh yes, and we should never assume that something will be rejected as prior
art until a court decided so, there have been several patent lawsuits already
that failed even though to one of us the patent claim would have been pretty
obviously subject to prior art. Also, a counter-claim for prior art is
not gratis, so it's an open question who would pay for all those lawsuits.

Fighting all the obvious patents that exist in the EU alone would already
take around EUR 18'000'000.-, judging from the official numbers named by
the EPO.

Anyway, even though this does affect NetBSD code, people might not be happy
with having us discuss it on tech-kern, so I wonder whether we should open
up a separate mailing list for patent issues or something like that concerning
NetBSD.

				Tonnerre

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