Re: [boost] Conflict with patent

Subject: Re: [boost] Conflict with patent
From: Aaron Wishnick (schnarf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-20 20:22:15

On Jul 20, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Mathias Gaunard wrote:
> It only matters if the patent holder tries to enforce the patent, which is realistically not going to happen in this case, because they would ultimately lose. The relation to his work is fairly remote, there is a massive amount of prior art (it's in TAoCP for god's sake), and it's a quite trivial addition to a widely known technique.
> 
> For these reasons, my opinion is that the Boost community shouldn't care about that particular patent if the code was ever considered for review. Of course that opinion is just that of a simple developer with no corporate experience, and I'm far from being a lawyer.
> 
> I do not know if there ever have been pieces of code rejected due to such far-fetched patents. I think there were discussions with a few atomic concurrency things and people managed to work around the patents, so surely some people know about subject very well.

I agree with you for sure. I just wanted to make the point that trying to invalidate a patent is a very difficult thing to do. As software developers, we can read a patent and find prior art and see very clearly that the patent ought not to be valid. My point is just that the legal system is not as simple as that, and it's important to be aware of the risks.