(rewritten for clarity Aug 21, 22, 2007) Changing interfaces of GPL software is permitted under the GPL. The license specifically permits anyone to make any changes in the code. There is no limitation concerning the intentions of the coder or the desires of the code “maintainer”. The entire project of marking certain interfaces in Linux…

Suppose that we said each year, each person named as an inventor or each company or person named as an assignee on a patent  qualified for a rolling fee. Say $200 for the first patent, $1000 for the next, $5000 for the third and $25000 for the fourth – 200×5^N.  Nice and simple. And to…

British Telecom breaks with the party line. This is the intersection of a business/political dispute about what business telecos should be in and a technical issue of QOS. Traffic shaping is a blunt instrument for QOS and part of the problem is that nobody bothers to try to characterize scheduling requirements more precisely than “needs…

Don Marti is asking the wrong question when he writes: The question is where you draw the line of what is or isn’t patent infringement. If Victor invents something, and I describe it in prose, I’m not infringing. If he invents something and I build it as hardware, I am. But if I do something…

Updated (and again, and even again – below) It should also be recognized that circuit arrangements are typically designed and fabricated at least in part using one or more computer data files, referred to herein as hardware definition programs, that define the layout of the circuit arrangements on integrated circuit devices. The programs are typically…