From: Ray Cromwell <rjc@clark.net>
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 95 19:05:44 PDT
To: cman@communities.com (Douglas Barnes)
Subject: Re: fast modular reduction
In-Reply-To: <v02120d11ac7406fa32d1@[199.2.22.120]>
Message-ID: <199509070205.WAA18771@clark.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 
> 
> I was very distressed when Josh gave this presentation; apparently
> patents have been filed, etc., and someone from another company
> in Europe was claiming they'd _already_ patented it.
> 
> What is the story here? From my pov, the performance increase doesn't
> justify the ramifications of dealing with yet another potentially
> surly patent holder (either Microsoft in your case, or whoever the
> irate European fellow was who claims to have already patented it.)

  I wish the damn patent offices of the world would get a clue. It used
to be when someone found a quicker algorithm, it was published in
a journal and sooner or later showed up in Knuth AoCP version x.y. Now,
every single algorithm gets patented. At the rate its going now,
"ComponentWare" of the future will mean the number of patent components
you managed to license simultaneously. The worst patent being
considered by the Patent Office right now is the dreaded Eolas patent
which purports to have invented the concept of "embedded applications"
in Web documents (e.g. Grail, Java, Safe-Tcl) and interprocess
communication between web browsers and helper applications
(e.g. NS-API/NC-API)

  The whole patent system needs to be abolished.

-Ray