Re: OT - Curl & patents

[Richard Uhtenwoldt <address@hidden>]

In article <psolmcpa9gx.fsf_-_@jekyll.curl.com>,
Christopher Barber  <cbarber@curl.com> wrote:

>> Can you say more about Curl's patents and about how they might
>> interfere with the freedom of future programming-language
>> designers?
>
>I think that if you were to look for patents filed by Applet, Microsoft, Sun,
>Macromedia et al you would find many patents in the area of compiler and
>language technology.

what is "language technology"?  do Curl Corporation's patents allow
Curl to sue designers of other programming languages?  To sue a
competing implementation of the Curl "content language"?  If so, then
Curl's patents are entering an area that except maybe for Rebol has up
to now been free of patents.

Now there are lots of languages that do not have 100 users even on a
good day, and there are so many of them that I cannot know if one of
them is covered by a patent.  There was even in the Seventies a
systems-programming language inside Univac Corporation protected by
trade secret law.  My assertion --that programming language *designs*
(excluding here *implementation* techniques) have up to now been free of
patents-- applies to those 5 to 10 dozen or so languages with more
than 100 users on a good day.

Except for a few "juggernaut" languages advanced by behemoths, like
Visual Basic, Java and C#, this group of 5 to 10 dozen languages
more and more consists of two types of languages:

(1) languages with a language standard like Common Lisp that came from
extensive consultation with a community *and* with several competing
implementations of that standard; or

(2) languages with an open-source implementation, as in Perl, Python,
Ruby, PHP and --these days-- many and probably most of the academic
languages, some of which, like O'Caml and Haskell, have 1000s of daily
users.  In the latter group, not only is the language *design* given
away but also the language *implementation*.

I do not see how Curl can succeed in such a market unless they sue
people or threaten to sue people for patent infringement.  (There are
"technology companies" that make a living this way rather than by
selling products.  They tend to have more lawyers than engineers.)
This is why I pointed out the 290-line license or user-agreement for a
small collection of web pages.  (Other .com's have long web-site
user agreements, but with them, the web site *is* the product, not
just a "brochure" for the product, as with Curl's.)
-- 
Richard Uhtenwoldt