There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle around TurboHercules recently; something to do with trying to make money out of patents, or whatever. The Free World doesn’t need to worry, because Jim Zemlin has been assured that IBM’s 2005 pledge is still in force.
Which begs the question. What was that pledge? Well, I’ve dug it up as a public service.
So, what are these patent gems? Well, there’s five hundred of them, and obviously I don’t have time to go beyond the headlines, but here are a few really useful things that the Gnomes of Linux (or maybe even the KDEs) are probably working on even as we speak:
US6237081 Queuing method and apparatus for facilitating the rejection of sequential
instructions in a processor
US6189065 Method and apparatus for interrupt load balancing for powerPC processors
US5625787 Superscalar instruction pipeline using alignment logic responsive to boundary
identification logic for aligning and appending variable length instructions to instructions stored in cache
US6292843 Quick loading of run time dynamic link library for OS/2.
US6266808 Computer program product for enabling the construction of dialogs for commands and templates
US5675795 Boot architecture for microkernel-based systems HAH!
US5664210 Method and system of providing multiple selections in text on a computer
display
US6256628 Data charting (yes, honestly)
US5686957 Teleconferencing imaging system with automatic camera steering
US6182044 System and methods for analyzing and critiquing a vocal performance
US6182154 Universal object request broker encapsulater
US6209575 Tamper proof set screw
... well, there’s a whole load more bullshit patents in there; find the one you think is funniest.
It doesn’t take much for the Boys in Brown to cozy up to the tit, does it? I’d love to hear of a single one of these patents that is a relevant to Linux b up-to-date and c not equally open to just about anybody else.
Oh yes; I think my nomination for funniest patent is:
US6330607 Method and system for recovering system resources used by an inactive Telnet client
The reason I think this is the funniest is that I genuinely can’t see the need for it. I don’t even need to see the body of the patent. And if it works on an IBM (hell, even AIX) “system,” why should it possibly be relevant to a Linux “system?” Repeat after me: FIN WAIT 2.
Comments
Well, apparently, the Boys in Brown say that they have promoted “openness” (you know, just as much as Al Gore has invented the Internet). All they want at the end of the day is just some non-existent credit for something they didn’t do. Just give them a little bit of it already, for the sake of charity.
US5638539 – Tool for defining complex systems
That’s my favorite one so far.
However, to be fair, they just state that any “open-source” project may use these patents, not that they’d mean Linux explicitely.
Also, we all know that GNU Hurd is JustAroundTheCorner™, thus this micro-kernel booting is obviously important! ( Nevermind that GNU Hurd will probably not be able to boot before the patent expires )
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