Re: OT - Curl & patents

[Christopher Barber <address@hidden>]

Richard Uhtenwoldt <ru@river.org> writes:

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

Technology used to implement programming languages: go look up patents held by
those companies.

> do Curl Corporation's patents allow Curl to sue designers of other
> programming languages?  To sue a competing implementation of the Curl
> "content language"?

It would require an enormous amount of effort for someone else to implement
the Curl language, and I don't see why anyone would bother to try, but I
imagine that we would probably try to prevent someone from duplicating our
product.  Other than that, I really doubt that any of our patents are going to
hamper language designers in any way.

> 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*.

Yes, but none of these languages are client-side.  Client-side languages must
be able to make security assurances for anyone to consider using them widely.
Such assurances can not be backed up effectively by a public community because
no one is accountable for them.

> 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.)

We are not that kind of company, and I would never work for such a company.

Yes, we have some software patents, but so what?  Not all companies with
software patents go around suing everyone in sight.  We just don't want to get
stomped on by those behemoths you mentioned.

BTW, I am just an engineer and do not speak for the company in any way.  These
are just my own opinions.

- Christopher