No subject

you cannot get a patent for anything that has been around before.
So if a skilled engineer sees that the claims of a patent are things that
are already available in any other product, the claim is void.


>> The gain of knowledge to Computer Science from
>> Linux is zero - most of the "ideas" have been copied from Sun.

>No, you're not comparing like with like. Linux is Free Software. If you
>accept that source code is speech (which is what makes this arguable),
>having the code around is essentially equivilent to publishing. It's a

But patents and Copyright are not related. So why do you make this
comparison?

>reference work, if you like. SunOS is proprietary software; it is most
>definitely not a published work (not counting the current SCSL or
>whatever release, since we're talking 1993). How it works internally is
>a trade secret almost, you can't argue that it has contributed to the
>art. Sun's implementation of raw network access will help no-one except
>Sun engineers.=20

My understanding of prior art is that the idea has been around before and
used in products. The important thing in publishing ideas is to tell other
people that the idea did exist. If somebody starts selling closed source 
software, this also is proof that some ideas have been put into products.
As you cannot patent something that is not a new idea, finding any selling
product from a competitor should be sufficient to proove that the claim
of a patent is void.


>Don't turn this into a Sun vs. Linux argument again please, we've had
>enough of that...

Well this was not my intention, but you started with Sun bashing.......



Jörg

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