[Patents] Found today.

[Stefane Fermigier sf@fermigier.com]

http://www.op.net/~pbd/amazon-1click.html

``As one of the founding programmers at Amazon.com, I was very dismayed
to learn of the company's legal attempts to enforce its 1-Click (TM)
patent. Richard Stallman and many others have already done much to
outline why the patent was a bad one to begin with, and why the legal
enforcement is even worse. Amazon.com's early development relied on the
use of tools that could not have been developed if other companies and
individuals had taken the same approach to technological innovation that
the company is now following. Tools like the GNU C and C++ compilers,
Perl, the Unix mmap(2) call, the Berkeley DBM library: these are all
software tools that contain far more innovative and significant ideas
than Amazon.com's 1-Click (TM) system, and in turn depend upon ideas and
innovations that came before them. If developers of these tools, or the
researchers and software engineers who worked on the systems that led
to their development, had sought and been awarded patents on the many
marvellous computational methods that their tools embody, Amazon.com's
early existence would have been a costlier and less efficient one.

When I agreed to join Amazon.com, I required several clauses in my
contract detailing techniques that Amazon.com was prohibited from
patenting or claiming as proprietary. [...]''

-- 
Stéfane Fermigier, Tel: 06 63 04 12 77 (mobile).
<www.portalux.com>: le portail Linux / logiciel libre.