interesting piece on Open Systems and Patents
Getting it all going was quite a story, but it\ufffds not the story I\ufffdm telling here. That story started late on the evening when, alone in a lab in Redmond, for the first time I had an index of the whole thing, and I sat down to try it out. Since search software is what I know about, I used the search software to search for patents about search software. An hour later, I was sick and stunned and horrified. Every basic component of conventional search software, including pieces dating back to the Seventies, was patented. Postings list? Patented. Boolean queries? Patented. Tokenization (patented) of Asian languages (patented) using finite automata (patented) with embedded markup? All patented. Search with parallel servers (gasp)? Patented. Mostly by people I\ufffdd never heard of, but IBM and Xerox and Intel and lots of other big names were there. \ufffd
I can\ufffdt imagine that search is that much different from any other area of software. Thus the lesson. \ufffd
regards,
daemon