On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 06:59:05 -0700 (PDT), william(at)elan.net
<william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net> wrote:
I searched through US Patent database for Microsoft applications in
the last several years and there are lots and lots of them and some to
me look similar to techniques in use by some open-source projects. This
tactic by such a large company is very disturbing because they know that
open-source movement in general is based on individual collaborative work
and they do not have the money and resources to fight microsoft patents.
I hope this isn't considered "bad form", but if you want to explore
links between patents and companies, can I suggest you have a look at
the tools provided by a sister company.
http://www.anacubis.com
The free desktop tools (Windows and IE only, sorry) are an extension
of the data
visualisation techniques we've been applying to law enforcement and
fraud investigation for the last 10 years, but with a commercial bent
for commercial investigations - anacubis lets you browse various
online data sources like the patent database (and Hoovers etc.) and
explore the patents, companies, people etc.
The commecial product then adds lots more features (eg cross reference
patent info with Lexis-Nexis and Hoovers data and your own in-house
sources) but the free browser version definitely makes it easier to
explore the patents database it lets you drill down into the data by
each node that you extract.
Apologies to the list if this is considered overtly commercial.
--
T