Re: Software patents...

[Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@verizon.net>]

On Thursday 03 February 2005 13:49, Ralph Crongeyer wrote:
>Does anyone on this list know about or where/who to find info about
>software patents?
>My specific question is this: if I wrote a program my company that
> was being used on a government project and then I left the company
> and wanted to completely rewrite the code (it will do the same
> thing) and patent it myself, is that legal?
>
>Ralph

IANAL.  However, think about it.  The fact that you wrote the other, 
privately funded program would seriously 'taint' you in a court of 
law as far as your being able to defend youself against a suit should 
your former company take a legal interest in what you are doing as it 
would be in direct competition to their product.  Particularly if 
there was a "kissin cousins" similarity in the name it was to be 
known by.

That said, many years ago someone was talking about a program they had 
for the m68k boards, bragging about it, and I had him send me the 
stuff it did and a couple of screen shots.  The system I was working 
on didn't have that sort of graphics available, but the workalike 
program I wrote is now included in other software distributions just 
because its the best swiss army knife to have.  Text based of course, 
but for that OS, its the best tool for a lot of stuff.  And it did 
more than their utility ever thought of, mainly because things just 
kept getting in my way, so the fix for this or that became yet 
another option for my utility.

There have been no repercussions, mainly because their target box, and 
ours at the time only had moto labels on the cpu's as the common 
point.

But I suspect that the x86 field gets a lot more attention paid to it.

>--
>Linux, to keep you humble.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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