On Sun, 01 Apr 2001 16:48:16 BST, Lloyd Wood said:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Keith Moore wrote:
let's stamp out proprietary data formats (and patent profiteering)
in our lifetime.
and then the incentive to innovate is what, exactly?
I think Keith is railing against patent *profiteering* - the making of
large sums of money off something that shouldn't have been patentable
to begin with, due to the "obviousness" or "prior art" requirements.
Although the guys at RSA certainly changed the face of cryptography
for almost 2 decades, that application of prime numbers was certainly
novel and without prior art. On the other hand, there's been a rather
large quantity of total-manure patents issued of late. I'm sure that
we all can think of our favorite examples of THOSE...
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech