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Re: overloaded function handles


From: Robert T. Short
Subject: Re: overloaded function handles
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:38:27 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.22) Gecko/20090606 SeaMonkey/1.1.17

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
I would stretch it even a little farther - I wouldn't like the feature
to be removed or severely crippled (yes, performance also matters)
just to workaround a US patent (and I still say workaround would be
darn hard), because I want to use it. OTOH, I understand that this may
be a really big problem for users from USA, so maybe we should really
fork. This particular patent is fairly broad (intentionally, no
doubt), but even if it can be worked around, future patents may not
be.

Finally, one more, slightly silly idea: What position would the
Mathworks take on this matter? Maybe they wouldn't actually mind to
make some sort of license disclaimer, giving Octave users from USA the
license to use the feature? Or at least for non-commercial use
(provided that it's not automatically guaranteed by the law)?

Well, I am a U.S. citizen and have never felt unfortunate.  I also am OK
with the idea of software patents, but this one seems to egregiously
violate the obviousness criteria.  The U.S. patent system has gone kind
of whacko in recent years to the point that the U.S. Congress and the
USPTO are really rethinking the problem.  Unfortunately this patent has
already been issued.


I don't think we should cripple octave for some silly U.S. issue.  I am
meeting with my patent attorney for some other matters in the next few
weeks and we have put this on the agenda.  I will get some formal
advice.  I will ask him about the whole problem including remedies and
penalties, but for the short term here is what I think we should do.

First, Jaroslav (and anybody else working this problem), just do the
work so that this feature is available.

Second, I don't think a simple compile-time flag is enough.  However
suppose you leave some critical piece of the code out so the feature
can't simply be compiled back in.  Then create a patch that is available
only from a non-U.S. web site that enables the code.  For example, maybe
just pull the parser section out or brain-damage the data structure or
something that makes it nontrivial for a U.S. user to recreate the
feature.  The patch will not be available in the U.S. and so I think we
have demonstrated a willingness to abide by the U.S. patent laws.  If
this isn't enough, I will get real advice on how to proceed.

Of course, we can't prevent U.S. residents from downloading the patch,
but I don't think that is really our problem.  This is not a new issue.
The debian distribution used to (still does?) have a nonus portion of
the archive mostly because of encryption and other export issues.

I would really like to avoid a whole fork.  That may be the best way to
manage it, but it seems like a small set of patches would suffice.


If anybody else has access to the appropriate attorney types it wouldn't
hurt to get some other advice.  Also, even though I think it unlikely,
would it hurt to ask the Mathworks folks about some sort of
permissions?  As for noncommercial use, I don't think that really
matters but I am not sure.  The U.S. patent law specifically prohibits
"making or selling" an invention covered by a patent.  I will check on
that though.

It wouldn't hurt for our fearless leader to weigh in here.  JWE?

Bob




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