On Wed 16 Nov 2005 at 23:10:41 -0800, Chuck Silvers wrote:
> well, for my day job I implemented a version of this myself several years
> ago (and spent forever tweaking it to not cause problems with various
> single-threaded patterns), and some other guys later tossed that and
> wrote a different version.  however, neither of these is open-source and
> to make it worse, both algorithms are patented, so we'll need to do
> something different.  I'll look up the patent numbers so you can see
> what we need to avoid.  I have some ideas on other ways we can do this
> that should avoid the patents, but I'll let you think about it for a bit
> separately first, hopefully you'll have some fresh ideas.

Some people say that programmers should NOT look at such patents, for
reasons of "willful infringement". So anyone considering looking at
patents should inform themselves on that topic. I personally will not
look at them, even being outside the USA where the reasoning probably
doesn't hold.

Some other people say that algoritms should not be patented at all,
being pure mathematics and all that.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert      -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl        -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.