On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 23:40 +0900, robert song wrote:
Hello, everyone.
Now I am using Pettis-Hansen method as follows to reorder functions.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/kim/courses/cs771/papers/pettis90profile.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93550
Paper was published in 1990.
But I found that the algorithm has its patent as below.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP0459192.html
I took a closer look. That's a European patent:
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=EP&NR=0459192&am...
Which according to this:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-os/p-journal/p-pj/p-pj-epuk?startYea...
It "Ceased" on May 8, 2008.
There's some stuff about "Ceased through non-payment of renewal fee" and
"Lapsed" at the end of this page:
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/inpadoc?CC=EP&NR=0459192A2...
I don't know anything about European patents but that sounds like
"Expired" to me.
The US patent seems to be here:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5212794.html
With an "estimated" expiration date of June 1, 2010.
Is HP known for being a patent troll? What is their track record with
open source? (I honestly don't really know.)
This patent doesn't seem like much of a threat anymore and in a little
over a year will be completely gone. Imagine the ruckus if HP started
trying to sue everyone over gcc. Why would they bother with such a PR
nightmare on a patent that's a year from expiring? (The answer is,
getting bought out or taken over by patent trolls, like what happened to
SCO...)
... I of course am not a lawyer.