Re: [DotGNU]RE: Developers digest, Vol 1 #170 - 10 msgs

[Norbert Bollow]

> I believe the charter on DotGNU's page says
> competing  by inventing. Changing gears now ?

No... from the beginning, DotGNU has always wanted to be
standards-compliant... the question being what standards to
comply with (apart from obvious ones, like e.g. the ECMA
standards for C#).

At the same time, Microsofts has indicated that they want to use
patents against Free Software projects, and one way of
_defending_ against _patents_ is to have "prior art".  For this
reason it makes sense to "invent" as much as possible, and publish
the "inventions" (e.g. by posting them to mailing lists), in
order to prevent those ideas from possibly being made
unavailable to Free Software through patents.

That is a long-term strategy.  Due to the specifics of the
definition of "prior art", this does not help at all in the
short term.

In the short term, using existing, published standards is the
best defense against patent claims.  But even when there are no
standards that we could use, we should not worry too much about
patents, as there is enough "prior art" around that almost every
software patent (which is not in a special area like
cryptography) can be shown to be invalid in court if worse comes
to worst.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
A member of FreeDevelopers and the DotGNU Steering Committee: dotgnu.org
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet   (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59       Fax +41 1 972 20 69      http://thinkcoach.com
Your own domain with all your Mailman lists: $15/month  http://cisto.com