Re: a thought on mixing Dylan & HTML

[Richard Uhtenwoldt <address@hidden>]

In article <psoelip8w5n.fsf@jekyll.curl.com>,

>> - I ain't about to pay anybody a fee per kb of code executed! No way, no
>> how.
>
>That is understandable, many people have objected to this business model and
>we are planning to modify it, but I don't know the exact details.  If the only
>thing stopping you from considering using Curl commercially is the business
>model, I would encourage you to contact our sales people to work something
>out.

The page http://www.curl.com/html/legal.jsp contains 290 lines of
legalese about curl.com's web *pages*.  I assume there is a separate
license for any software downloaded from the site.

Clearly, Curl, Inc, is a very lawyer-centric place.

at http://www.eaijournal.com/News.asp?Newsid=637 I find that Curl
"contains patent-pending configuration and versioning technology that
enables content built with any version of the Curl content language to
be executed."

Programming-language design has been the focus of vigorous research
and innovation for 45 years *without* any intellectual-property
inducements.  Implementations have been covered by copyright, but the
languages themselves have been covered by neither patents or
copyrights.  The only exceptions to this rule that I know of are the
recent Rebol language and some protection which amounted to the moral
equivalent of Trademark on Ada to prevent incomplete implementations
from calling themselves Ada implementations and more recently similar
protection on Java, particularly the phrase "100% Java".

Trademarks do not worry me, but I dread the appearance of patents in
this space.  It seems so unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Can you say more about Curl's patents and about how they might
interfere with the freedom of future programming-language
designers?

-- 
Richard Uhtenwoldt