The people at the US Patent office should be fired.
Shakespeare should be quoted (out of context if you want) :)
Cheers
--
Marco
Matthias wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently read on a German IT news page that some inventors from
> Microsoft have been granted a patent on "Replaceable classes and
> virtual constructors for object-oriented programming languages" (US
> Pat. #6,895,581, May 17, 2005, http://tinylink.com/?bCVVPOPPuw ).
>
> Citing from the patent they address the problem that
>
> "the introduction of a new derived class may require extensive
> editing and recompilation of existing source listing originally
> programmed to create objects of the old base classes. This process
> can be very time consuming and prone to errors, especially when the
> software project is large and the class hierarchy is complex. As a
> result, existing object-oriented programming languages do not
> facilitate incremental development of a software project by
> gradually replacing base classes with new derived classes."
>
> This is solved by introducing "replaceable" classes:
>
> "The class replacement allows an existing module to be reused to
> create objects of the new class without the need to modify and
> recompile the source code for the existing module. This ability to
> reuse existing code to create objects of new classes greatly
> facilitates incremental development of a software application by
> introducing new derived classes to provide refined functionality
> and features."
>
> The patent doesn't mention Lisp, but I wonder if this problem has not
> already been addressed in the same way by CLOS?
>
> Yours,
>
> Matthias
Marco Antoniotti wrote:
> The people at the US Patent office should be fired.
> Shakespeare should be quoted (out of context if you want) :)
:)
Well, actually they should just finally abolish the stupid,
harmful, state-monopoly concept of patents altogether. People
working in government are just slaves of the system, anyway.
And some quotes:
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of
today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the
industry would be at a complete stand-still today.
Bill Gates (1991)
'Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?'
Jonas Salk (1914-1995), who developed the first effective
anti-polio vaccine
Software patents go one step further: They withhold all forms of
expressions of a particular idea from you. This is why software
patents are potentially so much more harmful to our culture than
copyright: We all can find different ways of expression, but we
all share the same fundamental ideas.
- Markus Brinkmann
"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not
always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA
Some will say that such rights are needed in order to give artists
and inventors the financial incentive to create. But most of the
great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright
laws.
Roderick T. Long