I am working part-time on a personal project, and it's been going very well. I've shown it to a few people, and they are all extremely enthusiastic, so I've been considering actually finishing it up, adding some bells and whistles, and selling it. One key feature of the product is a certain combination of user interface and functionalit...
I've been reading up on Sun's new Garbage First garbage collection algorithm, and was considering using it on a personal project. When googling for more information I found that it is patented, which raises the question if I could ever release my code. How can I tell whether this specific research is safe to learn from and use? Did Su...
I've seen a lot of mentions like this one that Sun has patented their name mangling scheme for C++. It's certainly true that Sun's name mangling is much more efficient than the scheme used by IBM's xlC compiler, for example. But I can't find the actual patent anywhere. Does anyone have the patent #, or a link to the patent? Thanks! ...
I wanted to write a small Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) program for my mobile device but I realized that there are some patent issues associated with that technique (exhibit 1 and exhibit 2). Can I write such program and try to make money with it? Would it be legal to give such program for free? ...
In the course of my work as a software developer, I'm asked more and more often to evaluate patents (competitors' or ours), and I find that I lack the necessary skills to do that effectively. I'm used to reading scientific articles, but patents are deliberately vague, and seem to require a completely different know-how. I'm not trying t...
Now that it looks like software patents are going to be severely limited, does anyone have a good argument for keeping them. It seems like copyright law serves software fine and patents just add overhead to what should be an almost frictionless process. Are there any examples of software that wouldn't have been written if not for paten...
Like many developers, I too think I have a unique compression algorithm... but I know there are at least 6 million algorithms out there and (6 million - 1) of these are patented... it is highly probable that somebody has thought of this already. I'd like to find out. Ideally, somebody could show me a page where I would have a 10,000 foo...
Keeping in mind that this is not a question on the ethics of software patents, What books or resources do you recommend for self-filing of patents? Or, do you have solid reasons for why one should not self-file and instead use an attorney? ...
I'm working on a number of different software ideas culminating in our product release later this year. Some of our ideas appear unique (nothing on Google, in the books etc), but I don't want the hassle or expense of a patent. In fact the opposite I'd like to make sure anyone else (large corporation name here) can't take my idea, reverse...
Let’s say the Company A released the project under open source license. The Company B includes the work of the Company A into their solution and sells the solution to the Company C. If sometime in the future the Company D announces that the Company A’s implementation infringes their patent. What companies will be involved in the resoluti...
There's been quite a few questions about Obfuscation and how to avoid Reverse Engineering, etc... that got me thinking about a few points: Why do people believe that they have some incredibly valuable algorithm. Even if an algorithm is awesome, a single algorithm doesn't make a program. The experience and Business model have more powe...
Many answers to questions on stackoverflow about issues related to contracts, copyright, patents, licensing, advise the questioner to consult a lawyer. This sounds like good advice, but I believe the advice would be a lot more useful if there was more detail to the 'ask a lawyer' answer. Where can I find a list of lawyers that are expe...
I want to develop a free standard (free as in non-proprietary) along with a free reference implementation. Please understand that I don't want to go into depth of my idea (yet). It is, though, a serous idea. I've been now working nearly a year during my spare time on the specification and started with a reference implementation. Do I n...
I have been looking at stacked and it seems that it is marginalizing the heavy financial and intellectual investments made by the creators of Stackoverflow itself. I have been beaten down pretty heavily for bringing up this topic but I think it is an important question programmers, designers, and investors need to consider. I really wa...
I have looked at pipebytes.com and want to replicate how they send files and integrate it into one of my applications. Since I live in Europe where no software patents apply (as far as I know), do I have to worry at all? ...
I heard of a software patent for a "cursor" that is visible on black and white surface, and you can see the letters under a cursor. Is this story real? I couldn't find any sources. Does it make me a criminal if I program this (trivial) piece of code? Could I be put in jail? ...
Hi, the currently ongoing flame wars on the subject Mono and patents I wanted a look behind the curtains and propaganda material from both sides, but this doesn't seem to be so easy. What seems to be pretty clear is that anything not under the ECMA standard is endangered, especially libraries - but on the topic of the standard covered ...
I'm looking to port Oren Tirosh and Thomas Boege's excellent patent2pdf script (http://www.tothink.com/pat2pdf/pat2pdf) into a few languages, the first one being C#, so that it can more easily utilize it in my school research and so I can use it if I build other applications. The script requires an http fetcher and some libraries to man...
Eucalyptus is an open source software to create your own private cloud. It uses the same API as Amazon EC2 (and S3 for storage). I heared rumors that Amazon holds patents on the EC2 Webservice API and is therefore able to shutdown Ecualyptus (and other systems using the same API as Rightscale) basically from one day to another. However,...
I was just browsing on server side image generation and stumbled on following link: http://www.encke.net/Article13.html Does any of you know if this holds good any more or not? Did anybody challenged this patent? What does this patent mean? Do I need to respect this patent in UK and other countries too? ...