How come include file patent isn't mentioned in position paper?

Craig Jackson drilex1 dricejb at drilex.UUCP
Sat May 11 08:12:15 AEST 1991


In article <14730 at ulysses.att.com> smb at ulysses.att.com (Steven Bellovin) writes:
[In response to an article asking about the "include file patent".
>
>The patent number is 4,674,040, issued on June 16, 1987 to Barbara Barker,
>Irene Hernandez, and Rex McCaskill, and is assigned to (blare of trumpets)
>IBM.  RMS kindly provided me with the number a few weeks ago; I just
>got a copy of the patent.
>
>The essence of what they're saying is new is that they keep a
>back-pointer to the include file.  If you take the merged file, and run
>it through some formatter, and then edit the result, the changes are
>fed back to the included files.

Interesting...

The only product which I've used which has that capability is Microsoft
Word for Windows.  Of course, they have all sorts of cross-license
agreements with IBM.

However, my reaction to seeing it was, "Gee, somebody finally went to the work
of doing that."  I suspect that in software there is a fine line between
a new idea, and an idea that everybody has thought of but which seemed too
expensive in implementation time.  If somebody really comes up with a way
to do it in 10 lines of code, maybe they should get a 7-year patent on it or so.
However, if a large company merely throws programmer time at something
and implements something brute-force that should not be patentable.

Claimer: I disagree with RMS on software patents, but feel that 17 years
is a longer monopoly than necessary.  This probably holds true for many
other fields, too.
-- 
Craig Jackson
dricejb at drilex.dri.mgh.com
{bbn,axiom,redsox,atexnet,ka3ovk}!drilex!{dricej,dricejb}



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