[E-Lang] Does Sun own E?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

Since the conversation is escalating I am saying this publicly:

There are very strong reasons not to EVER discuss patents in a publicly
archived forum.

Here are the incentive realities around patents:

1. The patent office is completely unable to determine whether a
submission is innovative, so it defaults to "grant".

2. Lawyers are paid for successful filings rather than non-successful
filings. They would rather file a weak patent than no patent, and will
often grossly stretch or omit their knowledge of prior art in order to
obtain a granted patent filing. The sheer numbers involved have the
effect that they are almost never caught at this. When they are caught,
the penalty is a completely meaningless slap on the wrists.

3. The nature of patent cases is that the defender is guilty until they
prove themselves innocent. A trivial patent defense costs about $250k,
which is why patent greenmail is such a successful practice. Think of it
as government-supported racketeering. This is not universally fair, but
the exceptions are rare indeed.

The cold reality is that *every* technology infringes on patents, and
that the vast majority of these patents are crap. Further, most of the
proper patents go unenforced most of the time. Finally, in our
particular area, most of the core ideas were established so long ago
that it is exceptionally hard to introduce a new, valid patent.


The only possible thing you can achieve by an open discussion of
relevant patents in an archived list is to tip off the patent holders
that their patents are potentially being infringed. Every time you do
this successfully, you will generate one of two outcomes:

	1. Work on something critical will stop.
	2. MarkM, or I, or someone, will spend $250k getting a bad
	   patent thrown out, and lots of time that we could otherwise
	   spend doing useful work for the community.

Remember: search engines are a wonderful thing, but not just for you.

The purpose of this list is to discuss the E programming language. Let's
keep it that way.  If you have a patent issue, bring it up with MarkM
privately.   I believe that you can rely on his integrity to judge when
it is appropriate to address such issues publicly on a case by case
basis.

If you *know* of a patent that MarkM needs to consider. Please do tell
him PRIVATELY. Please do NOT speculate on such issues publicly; you can
only hurt yourself and everyone else.


Jonathan S. Shapiro