[Mono-list] ASP.NET - usability/robustness/safety

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 19:36, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
<snip/>
> Any software that does anything remotely interesting today is likely to
> infringe on a dumb patent in a way or another, specially web sites.

(Many apologies for bringing this up now, but I thought it somewhat
relevant.)

Just to follow up on this, the Foundation for a Free Information
Infrastructure put up a site demonstrating how a simple, typical, web
page would infringe on 20 European patents.

	http://webshop.ffii.org/

And to make you *really* scared, these are software patents *already
granted* in the "software patent free" European Union.  As soon as
software patents are legalized in Europe, all of these can be used for
licensing or lawsuits.

It's a fair bet that most of these patents also exist in the U.S.A.

In short, don't worry about patents: you can guarantee there's a patent
already issued on whatever it is you want to do anyway.  So you can
either do nothing (say bye to the software field), ignore them, or deal
with them on a case-by-case basis (effectively ignoring them until you
can't ignore them ;-).

Or, lobby your lawmakers and get the patent situation fixed.  Which is
really the only viable solution unless we want to see the death of
independent developers for the next 20 years...

 - Jon