[Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: [Patents] brevets et logiciel libres (version elaboree)

[Jean-Marc Libs libs@cybercable.tm.fr]

On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, PILCH Hartmut wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, John Tobey wrote:
>  
> > > Bruce Perens has been threatened with a lawsuit by a company who got a
> > > patent on his e-fence concept just a few months before he published his
> > > program. Another programmer who wrote a GNU program had to stop because 
> > > of
> > > a patent which came later than his idea.  This case is mentioned in a
> > > paper by Richard Stallman on http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/.
>  
> > Hrmm.  Yes, I had read about these two cases.  Maybe instead of
> > claiming that "many have been sued", we should point out that many
> > American programmers *risk* being sued or are *threatened* with legal
> > action.
> 
> Or speak about "legal harrassment" instead of "suing".  
> There are also the Thomson and the IPIX case.  Hasn't there been any suing
> yet in these?

The end result is that the development stopped, isn't it ?
An example I am particularly annoyed by is the gd library from
Thomas Boutell. This started as a gif generation library, used
for example for on-the-fly gif generation in web pages (I used
it with PHP).
Go see the statement on top of http://www.boutell.com/gd
It states that it does not generate gifs from version 1.6.3 and
up. Versions before 1.6.3 are not distributed anymore (how long
before a black market for free software develops ? ) 

Jean-Marc Libs

--
"The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system
and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world."
                -- Drakmere