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Re: OT? MS patent



There have been discussions about these things periodically, and this
particular one was mentioned in Debian Weekly News.  Not to panic people,
but there are tons of these things in the patent database.  Compaq, for
example, has a very expansive set of claims in a patent filed in 1994:

http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05586304__&s_clms=1#clms

It is my intention to express no opinion here about either the validity of
such a patent nor of its possible interrelationship with Debian tools.  
Nor is it my intention to provoke anyone, but it should be understood that
patents are, first and foremost, high-stakes games played with the English
langauge, at least in the United States.

-- Mike


On 2000-05-05 at 23:51 +0200, Svante Signell wrote:

> Did you see the story about the recent microsoft patent with similar
> functionality as apt?
> 
> http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/05/1033208.shtml
> 
> Is this a case of prior art?



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