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RMS Seeks Anti-Patent Information

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-look-into dept.

SubtleNuance asks: "Free Software's venerable leader has made an open appeal to the Internet community. RMS seeks information about instances where Free Software projects were impeded by a software patent. You can read his open letter at Linux Today. RMS specifically seeks 'cases where a free program has been withdrawn from use or interfered with'. Surely the /. community can come up with a few examples to aid Mr. Stallman's arguments. Parties with specific information are to send an e-mail to patent-examples@gnu.org "

2 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. Thoughts by Enry · · Score: 3

    Lessee..:

    GIF encoders/decoders
    MP3 encoders (are decoders covered?)
    RSA encryption (expired, but that's besides the point)
    DeCSS probably doesn't fit, as it wasn't a patent.
    Is CueCat patented? Probably not.

    -Mark

  2. RSA patent by rjh · · Score: 3

    GnuPG fails to fully implement RFC2440 due to the IDEA patent. While IDEA is specified as a PGP cipher, GnuPG can't implement it.

    For a long while, the RSA patent was also an obstacle to GnuPG, OpenSSH, and just about everything else out there that needed public-key crypto. The expiry of the Diffie-Hellman patent (in 1997) helped some, but there were still a lot of obstacles.