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Patents Software Linux

Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent 409

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cheese-with-your-wine dept.
davidwr writes "UKBuilder.com reports that Borland's structured exception handling (SEH) patent affects Winelib. Winelib allows you to compile Windows-targeted code to run natively on Linux. Because of the patent, gcc does not include support for SEH, which is widely used in the MS-Windows world. There are workarounds, but you won't like them."
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Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent More

Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent

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  • Who Next? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @03:56PM (#12512779) Homepage Journal
    I'm sure that Wine was looking for a Microsoft-based patent attack [slashdot.org], but this one probably caught many off guard.

    Who else may have submarine patents might affect the development of Wine?

    • Re:Who Next? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:00PM (#12512843)
      Makes you wonder if Eben Moglen did anybody a favour in bringing people's attention to Wine's potential patent problems. With patents its best not to even look for them. This just gives Borland ideas I'm sure. They don't have any products to sell these days do they? Why not expand into the litigation market.

      Its great that there are lawyers willing to spend time on OSS projects, but they just dumped a whole pile of hurt on Wine if Borland pursues this.
      • I can think of one other open source package that *can* link to proprietary libraries to get enhanced capabilities.

        Best just to keep it to ourselves, I guess.

      • Re:Who Next? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by wallykeyster ( 818978 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:17PM (#12513023)
        Its great that there are lawyers willing to spend time on OSS projects, but they just dumped a whole pile of hurt on Wine if Borland pursues this.

        How do you figure? TFA simply says that gcc can't implement the features because Borland has a patent. This means that people wanting to use Winelib must remove the SEH portions of their code in order for it to compile. This is a story about a shortcoming of gcc and Winelib because so many Windows C++ developers use SEH instead of sticking to standard C++. I see no threat of lawsuit from Borland or any potential for it.

        • How do you figure?

          Sorry, I'm making a generalization. That's just the first thing I thought of when I read the story the other day.. "Uh oh, here they come".

        • Non sequitur (Score:4, Informative)

          by alexo ( 9335 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @05:51PM (#12513921) Journal

          > This is a story about a shortcoming of gcc and Winelib because so many
          > Windows C++ developers use SEH instead of sticking to standard C++.

          There are a lot of things that standard C++ does not cover:
          UI, Device I/O, Threading, Synchronization, Async I/O, Interprocess Communications, Virtual Memory management, Registry access, Networking, etc.
          For that, you must use the underlying OS features (either directly or via a library that abstracts it).

          SEH is one such element. It allows you to catch "system" exceptions such as access violations. It is an OS feature that standard C++ does not address.

          Quoting form the MSDN:
          [The] difference is that the structured exception handling model is referred to as "asynchronous" in that exceptions occur secondary to the normal flow of control. The C++ exception handling mechanism is fully "synchronous," which means that exceptions occur only when they are thrown.

      • Re:Who Next? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Red Alastor ( 742410 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:17PM (#12513026)
        Borland use winelibs in their Linux Delphi/C++ Builder version called Kylix so they don't have to rewrite all the Windows native code.

        By suing the Wine folks, they'd shoot themselves in the foot.
        • Borland use winelibs in their Linux Delphi/C++ Builder version called Kylix

          Thats a good point. So they could either do the right thing and donate a license, or use their patent to gain some control over Wine.

          /me keeps his fingers crossed.

        • Past tense (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Micah ( 278 )
          That should be in the past tense. Kylix is toast. Has been for a year or two. Borland screwed the pooch royally with it.

          Reason #372 to never trust anything important to a proprietary platform.

        • Re:Who Next? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by absinthminded64 ( 883630 )
          It seems to me after I RTFA that the wine group actively identified this as being a problem and pursued corrective measures. The article also mentions that PostgreSQL replaced some of their functionality recently to avoid conflicting with an existing IBM patent even though IBM declares that it will not use it's patent war chest against any OSS projects. I think this sends a clear signal that the community is aggressively looking for this type of thing. I've no idea how Borland has been doing financially

        • Good point, Borland is Wine friendly, so... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:04PM (#12514827)

          ...here's an idea that maybe nobody has tried yet.

          Ask them.

          Rather than do the collective F/OSS thing and lose our minds about a software patent that's in the way...how about asking Borland if we may write something their patent covers?

          Has it at least been tried yet?

          Yes, software patents are evil. And yes, exception handling has tons of prior art. And still yes, this is freaking obvious. But still. It's only a problem if they complain, and they're less likely to do so if we just simply do the good manners thing and ask first.

      • I doubt Borland cares.

    • What patent? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:07PM (#12512918)
      This is the patent [uspto.gov] in question.
    • This isn't a submarine patent [c2.com] as it was filed in 94 and granted 3 years later. And I'd assume borland was probably using it before the patent was granted instead of patenting vaporware and trying to delay the process long enough till invention becomes viable.
      • This isn't a submarine patent...

        Well, to pick a nit, I never said it was a submarine patent.

        My question was posed in an attempt to generate discussion over whether their were other companies outside of Microsoft who might hold submarine patents that could affect Wine development.

        Sorry I wasn't more clear.

  • Donation please... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @03:57PM (#12512792)
    This is where Borland needs to step in by giving the patent (or providing a legal exception) to the OSS community.

  • Borland's still around? (Score:4, Funny)

    by CyberSnyder ( 8122 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @03:59PM (#12512815)
    Guess I've been doing too much Unix...

  • Ugly workaround? (Score:5, Funny)

    by evil-osm ( 203438 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @03:59PM (#12512817)
    There are workarounds, but you won't like them.

    Use Windows? (ducks)

  • Is that ironic (Score:5, Informative)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:01PM (#12512847)
    Since Borland USED Winelib in Kylix.....

    Amazing how thing like this rear their head AFTER a company that holds the Patent actually used the app in their OWN product, can you say STINGY
    • Doesn't that just beg the question...
      Can you use the compiler from Kylix to compile wine?
      After all, there was a free version of Kylix...

    • no, it's legally interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:04PM (#12512893)
      Winelib is covered by the LGPL. If Borland has shipped Winelib in Kylix, they may already have given people a license to use the code. Perhaps they can wiggle out of that, but they can't continue to ship Winelib if they claim a patent on something in it.

      • Re:no, it's legally interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rogueuk ( 245470 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:15PM (#12512998) Homepage
        But I thought the SEH isn't a part of winelib because of this. It's not a question of the code already existing, it hasn't been written yet and can't be written due to this patent.

      • Re:no, it's legally interesting (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Except that the "not implemented in gcc" implies this feature is not yet in winelib and won't be soon. So they wouldn't have distributed a version of winelib that contains an implementation of the patented algorithm(s).
      • Finally someone who actually bothered to RTFA and use their brain.

        • Umm... (Score:2)

          by tgd ( 2822 )
          Its a GCC problem, not a Wine problem. Wine can't do it because GCC doesn't support it.

          Unless Borland added it to GCC, the grandparent isn't the one who needs to RTFA and use their brain.
          • Which is why I recommended modding up the parent. Did you even read my post?
          • Its a GCC problem, not a Wine problem. Wine can't do it because GCC doesn't support it.

            Perhaps the GCC or the Wine people should help the OpenWatcom people with binary ELF support. Watcom supports SEH.

            Just a suggestion.
            Enjoy,

      • That doesn't make any difference. The problem is not that you and I can't use SEH. The problem is that SEH isn't a feature of GCC, because like all GPL products, it can't include software obtained under a "non-free" patents. The GPL sez,

        We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

    • There is nothing in the GPL/LGPL that says anything about the license being revoked if you enforce a patent.

      That is one of the things that is expected to be cleared up in GPL v3.

  • Stupid software patents (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cyphertube ( 62291 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:01PM (#12512853) Homepage Journal

    Again, I hate software patents. There's no point.

    Most of what you'd want to protect is covered by copyright. If it can't be covered by copyright, well, then it's something so basic (like "the dog is big") that it's almost impossible to express something without doing it that way.

    Again, this is where the idea of a software patent is stupid. Don't allow people to do things in ways that you really couldn't cover with copyright?

    Ok, now I find myself back to the argument that source code is speech, and hence not patentable.

  • GCC list discussion (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bananenrepublik ( 49759 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:02PM (#12512866)
    Of course this was discussed on the gcc list, the thread starts here [gnu.org].

    Links to an implementation of this can be found in this mail [gnu.org], the legality of this implementation is discussed in the followup.

    The inevitable prior-art discussion begins here [gnu.org].

    • First really useful links I've seen yet, thanks. Looks like the patent is with respect to using an exception frame pointer on the stack. Other implementations I've seen such as this one [sourceforge.net] merely maintain their own global stack.

      Sun's patent looks a lot more broad, and is more recent, but it also seems to use an external stack with setjmp/longjmp, for which DEC's implementation beats 'em by a decade. Not quite as featureful as Sun's, but the same core idea is in there.
  • I am not a developer, but how difficult is it to create a space in Wine for a SEC patent legal module to "plug in" to Wine? Winers could either use Wine without SEC or purchase a licenced module. Of course, some good hearted soul would release the source code, and then those who wanted to run the module illegally could do so as well. (Did I say that out loud?)
    • There is no need to release the source code. This is one of those obvious patents - everyone already knows how to do it. Indeed, it is only the Intel flavor of similar exception conventions used on other stack based processors since the 70's. This patent effectively patents an ABI. It is trivial to use some other convention - but then the code is not interoperable. I wonder if the judge who started us down the road of software patents regrets his decision.

  • This is good news for open source. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jimbro2k ( 800351 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:06PM (#12512907)
    From TFA: ""Having your FOSS project depend on a non-free tool can be a big problem in terms of adoption."

    Even worse, this makes it clear that using patent-encumbered software has a genuinely unpleasant viral effect on all your software.

    The pro-patent folks will eventually realize that the best solution is to avoid ALL patent-encumbered software COMPLETELY -- and look even more skeptically at all proprietary software, too. This will have the opposite effect of what they had intended.

    • Dream on.

      They'd rather spend and hope that they can litigate someone and make money off it, rather than come to some sort of oh-angelic-realization.

      They're in it for the money and for the greed, if they had any remnance of altruism or understanding, they'd have realized it a long time ago, with or without situations.

      If anything, it would go worse, not better.
    • From TFA: "Having your FOSS project depend on a non-free tool can be a big problem in terms of adoption."

      Oh [slashdot.org], really [slashdot.org]?

  • Thanks! (Score:2, Funny)

    by jwthompson2 ( 749521 )
    There are workarounds, but you won't like them.
    Thanks Marvin!

  • Solution: (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IIRC there is a version of DeCSS that works similarly:

    1. Take function.c, where function.c is the patented software.

    2. Add a /* */ style comment at the end of the file.

    3. gzip the file

    4. Write a program that evalautes the entire contents of the file as a single number, and check if that number is prime.

    5. If it's not, increment the crap inside the comment, repeat steps 3 and 4 and check again for prime. Eventually, you will find a prime.

    Now, you have a prime number, that if you run gzip on it, w

    • Re:Solution: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Gogogoch ( 663730 )
      Hey - why not do this with the MS Windows XP distribution ISO file?

      Lets see. XP is probably about 650Mb, so that's 5.6x10^12 bits. Let's round down for GZIP and call it 10^12 bits.

      So we just need a prime in the order of 2^(10^12). That can't be hard to do, can it? Just because the highest prime so far is in the order of 2^(10^7) just means that those mathematicians have been slacking it a bit! Lazy bums! And no doubt their software is lousy and totally inefficient. I'm sure Slashdotters could fix that.

      Bu

  • You won't like them. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tenebrious1 ( 530949 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:09PM (#12512945) Homepage
    There are workarounds, but you won't like them.

    Wow, sounds like he's depressed, like he has a pain in all the diodes down his left side or something.

  • Ask Nicely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:10PM (#12512948) Homepage Journal
    Next, a wave of Slashdotters will hassle Borland to release the patent, or exempt Wine. The objective is worthy, the self-organized social wave of independent activists is meaningful. But the style will most likely be counterproductive.

    I recently advised a graphic designer/artist friend whose Flash app (advertising a minor celebrity pool player) drew the ire of an OSS "advocate". They demanded that the Flash movie be replaced with something that didn't require any "closed source" software to use it. My friend and I replied politely with their cost:benefit analysis (>95% of desktops can use Flash), the fact that Flash is an open standard (SWF), and the reality of making choices that can't please everyone, so the best alternative is chosen. The "advocate" devolved into namecalling and refusal to accept any of the designer/artist's reasons as valid. Which not only lost that private argument on facts, but alienated any possiblity of the designer/artist exploring OSS possibilities, as long as reliable old Flash still works.

    If you're going to request that Borland release its constraints on Winelib, remember that you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar. And that invitations to a company to join the OSS "community" makes you an ambassador from your community. Which demands high performance in charm and persuasion, rather than represent the community as a barbarian horde.

    • Re:Ask Nicely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RealAlaskan ( 576404 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:27PM (#12513134) Homepage Journal
      First, I agree with your ``ask nicely'' message. As another post pointed out, Intel and especially AMD would benefit by having better free compilers (they are complementary goods to their CPUs), so maybe we should be asking them to buy and contribute this patent. Nicely, of course.

      Second:

      I recently advised a graphic designer/artist friend whose Flash app (advertising a minor celebrity pool player) ...

      Don't ever let him get rid of that Flash. I've found that when I see a webpage that invites me to download Flash, I can just close that tab: there's nothing there for me to see. That's saved me a great deal of time and bandwidth which I might have wasted if those sites had used animated gifs instead.

    • what exactly is a "minor celebrity pool player"?

      is it something like "minor celebrity hair dresser" or "minor celebrity cab driver" ??

  • There's an uber-workaround (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:11PM (#12512963)
    The uber-workaround for software patents is to have the code copyrighted and "owned" in Europe. Europe (as of now) has no software patents. The code can be developed anywhere, but the copyright must be transfered to some European entity and it must be distributed from Europe.

    Remember, patents don't mean you can't code it. You can code it. You can use it for personal non-commercial use. You can distribute the code. But you can't use it commercially, distribute binaries, or sell it.

    So the coders can continue doing their merry work, producing code that would violate patents were it compiled and distributed, and the distributors can continue merrily distributing the code in Europe.

    The only people who are left out of this are Americans who would have to buy licenses from Borland to use the code in the US. That's fine; Americans should either pay according to their laws or change their laws.

    But we shouldn't let American laws affect the rest of the world where they don't apply.

    We need to start doing this for all open source software. There is no way to avoid trampling on patents if you're writing any fairly large or complex piece of software these days, especially any software that involves codecs, pre-existing APIs, and pre-existing file formats. Well, just about any useful piece of large software involves such things. Rather than getting into a hissy-fit on Slashdot every time some patent issue is discovered, open source developers should just plan for the problem and plan to bypass it.

    The patent situation is not like the copyright situation. Copyright laws are roughly similar everywhere in the world and they are enforcable everywhere in the world. There are wide divergences in patent law around the world and most of the world is not burdened by America's folly in this regard. Why should developers bear the burden of one country's legal folly? Answer: developers shouldn't, and should simply pick the right jurisdiction for hosting the project.

    This isn't some radical idea here. MPlayer, for example, could not possibly exist as a US-based project. US coders can and do contribute to it, but it's based in Hungary, where it's safe.

    • Re:There's an uber-workaround (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RealAlaskan ( 576404 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:35PM (#12513232) Homepage Journal
      The uber-workaround for software patents is to have the code copyrighted and "owned" in Europe. Europe (as of now) has no software patents.

      ``As of now.'' Something about your proposal is worrying me, but as of now I can't put my finger on it.

      Yes, it's a good, sensible plan for today, but there's this terrible [ffii.org] little [zdnet.co.uk] flaw [wired.com] which keeps it from being a long term solution.

    • Except even MPlayer isn't safe (Score:4, Informative)

      by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:47PM (#12513350) Homepage
      "US coders can and do contribute to it [MPlayer], but it's based in Hungary, where it's safe."

      Funny, but its current home page [mplayerhq.hu] doesn't exactly give me warm and fuzzy "safe" feelings. Methinks you chose a bad example there :-)

    • Europe (as of now) has no software patents.

      It's the "as of now" part that is worrisome. Europe could very well have software patents in the next year or two. The WTO and US are basically forcing most of the rest of the world to adopt US-style IP laws.

      Maybe instead of Europe, you could distribute from Cuba. Not likely to be software patents there as long as Fidel is alive :)

      But seriously, is there a list of countries somewhere that are resisting software patents? (India just signed up a few weeks back

    • Re:There's an uber-workaround (Score:5, Informative)

      by perrin ( 891 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @05:57PM (#12513959)
      > Europe (as of now) has no software patents.

      Wrong. The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued thousands of software patents. There are just doubts as to their enforcability, and several member countries do not accept them at all. This is what the new EU directive (CIID) is all about.

  • C++ Standard? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wallykeyster ( 818978 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:12PM (#12512975)
    Since this is a patented technology used in other compilers, I assume Borland licenses it but it can't be part of the C++ standard. This just seems to me like another great example of problems introduced when programmers rely on things that are not part of the standard. Whether it is Microsoft's custom portions of Java (which meant Java apps suddenly were no longer compatible with Sun's JVM) or vendor extensions to error handling, if you use a tool that does not meet defined standards, then you develop software that is much less useful (it may implement something cool but it has a more limited audience and an almost guaranteed shortened lifespan).

    • Re:C++ Standard? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Structured Exception Handling in question is purely for C, and is unrelated to exceptions in C++ or Java or any other language's implementation of them. It's hardly even the only C-based implementation around, so there's no shortage of source-compatible solutions. It is the one Windows uses, however, so binary compatibility would seem to demand it. However, I don't know if SEH even works across a DLL boundary -- usually its usage is even confined to a single compilation unit.
    • Actually, SEH is entirely orthogonal to the language issue.

      MSVC provides non-standard extensions for C and C++ code, sure, but even if you compile C++ compliant exceptions with MSVC, it translates it behind the scenes to SEH.

      SEH is the way that exceptions are implemented, and is thus not connected to language features.
  • What is SEH? How is it different from exceptions found in C++, Java, python, etc.?
    • AFAIK, SEH is a method for doing structured exception handling in any language.

      C++, Java, whatever... they all have exceptions. How does the compiler actually HANDLE the exception? SEH is a patent for how to put that exception information on the stack in an x86 environment.

      It's pretty specific and pretty proprietary; If you ask me this is an example of a good software patent for once. I'm sure SEH took a lot of work for the folks at Borland (and Microsoft?) to get working right. This isn't like Amazon

  • Why now? (Score:2, Informative)

    by sugarmotor ( 621907 )
    The patent is at

    http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,628,016.WKU.&OS=PN/5,628,016&RS =PN/5,628,016 [uspto.gov]

    The Patent Number is 5,628,016

    There are two dates:

    May 6, 1997

    and

    Filed: June 15, 1994

    I assume the 1997 date is the "granted" date. Why is this problem surfacing now, almost ten years later??

    Stephan
  • So what about this SEH is an issue.

    Last I knew, when you compile code that'll run under an OS, you're more or less stuck supporting the way that OS/hardware expects to run code. Is there some more optional/vendor specific stuff that is happening? On a UNIX system, at least, I can always peek at things with gdb no matter the compiler I used for it.

    Does this SEH stuff produce code that executes differently than other code? Is this unique to Windows?

    I'm just a little confused. =)

  • OS/2, Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NullProg ( 70833 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:24PM (#12513102) Homepage Journal
    From Microsoft,

    In digging through obscure .H and .INC files to piece together what constitutes Win32 SEH, one of the best sources of information turned out to be the IBM OS/2 header files (particularly BSEXCPT.H). This shouldn't be too surprising if you've been in this business for a while. The SEH mechanisms described here were defined back when Microsoft was still working on OS/2. For this reason, you'll find SEH under Win32 and OS/2 to be remarkably similar.

    Article here:
    A Crash Course on the Depths of Win32(TM) Structured Exception Handling [microsoft.com];

    Enjoy,

  • Seems like much ado, about nothing, to me. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by unicorn ( 8060 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:28PM (#12513148)
    So all that's broken here, is the ability to complile code, that was written for Windows, into *nix binaries. That's all.

    Is there really that much Windows code, getting ported to *nix? Seems like virtually all FOSS development flows the other way.

    Large commercial companies that develop for Windows first, will have the resources to fix the code to compile the other direction.

    And is WINE/WINELIB really a good solution? By taking something written for a particular platform, and just recompiling it straight over to a new platform aren't you going to end up with horribly unoptimized code no matter what? Rewriting the code to use non Windows specific calls will buy you a LOT of speed, and whatnot, I would think.

  • Let's Quit Whining and Fix this (Score:3, Funny)

    by TFGeditor ( 737839 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:32PM (#12513199) Homepage
    I know most of us here assembled are sick of all this software licensing crap. Slashdotter jokes notwithstanding, we are some of the most intelligent people on the planet. What say we combine that intellect and come up with a way to combat all this software patent madness?

    First suggestion: Elect a steering committee to form an organization/lobbying group.

    What do you think?
  • When porting Delphi to Linux (Kylix)?
  • Just move Wine servers offshore somewhere like Hungary and set up (virtual) shop there.

    It worked for MPlayer.

  • VMS was doing this in the 80's (Score:4, Informative)

    by valderost ( 668593 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:46PM (#12513337) Journal
    Hopefully somebody investigates OpenVMS as potential prior art here. The OpenVMS Condition Handling Facility provides substantially the same exception-handling functionality as SEH and has had much of it since the 80's. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/72final/5841/5841pro _038.html#chf_vaxalpha [hp.com]

  • Isn't that the point? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hanshotfirst ( 851936 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:52PM (#12513401)
    The point of patents (and copyrights) is to guarantee financial gain for the inventor of a product for a certain period of time before the design or material is released to the public domain.

    Now, discussions whether that should apply to physical inventions only or software is a topic I'm not getting into here.

    I'm not going to touch how long those patents or copyrights should be - that war rages in enough other threads.

    The financial gain for the inventor/creator is part of the motivation for inventing/creating. As much as I dislike MS, they are entitled to the rights afforded by their patents. Like it or not software is patentable around here, so we are stuck with the consequences.

    -2, unpopular concept

    • Re:Isn't that the point? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zerblat ( 785 )
      Perhaps that's the point of patents in today's perverted world. However, the original idea was that patents would encourage and stimulate invention and sharing of ideas. Instead of everyone trying to hide their methods from their competitors, the patent system gives inventors exclusive rights to their inventions in exchange for sharing information about the invention.

      However, the patent system doesn't guarentee financial gain for anyone (except for patent lawyers, that is). In some areas (e.g. medical res

  • An Alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eskwayrd ( 575069 )
    How about someone from GCC and/or Wine contact Borland and ask how much a license would cost to include SEH in these products? Or, ask them how much they'd be willing to part with the patent for?

    If it's feasible, organize a fundraising effort from the OSS community, buy the license/patent from Borland, and immediately release the code under the appropriate xGPL. Many OSS contributors are corporations with a fair bit of money, so I see this as being at least worth discussing.

    If nothing else, this is a

  • Only for porting windows apps to linux .... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scharkalvin ( 72228 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @04:54PM (#12513416) Homepage
    Since this problem only affects porting existing windows code to Linux, it could be solved by
    using the MS tools and linking the app with winlib.
    Before you flame this, consider who would be doing this....someone who has a closed source application already working on Windows and wants to sell his application to the Linux market. IIRC, winlib is licensed under the LGPL, so this approach would be legal. (and this is EXACTLY how Coral ported Wordperfect 2000 from windows to Linux).

  • Software Patents (Score:3, Interesting)

    by psychofox ( 92356 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @05:38PM (#12513818)
    Man, I HATE software patents, with a passion.

    I used to work for a large bank, the largest investment bank in the world in fact. A couple of years ago they sent an internal memo around proclaiming that they had just lodged their first patent and were well proud of it. They said something like "we have another several hundred in the pipeline". I wrote an semi-anonymous email back to the global head of the division of IT where I work, basically saying that that he'd better be ready to reap the whirlwind once all the banks started realising that they could patent ridiculously simple concepts (like using a PDA with realtime updates to enhance the productivity of specialists on the floor of the exchange, which was we had apparently 'invented').

    I never heard another thing about software patents and a few months go I left.

  • Enough alrady. (Score:3, Funny)

    by nrlightfoot ( 607666 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @05:55PM (#12513950) Homepage
    Let's just start our own country and be done with all these stupid laws.

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