Software Patents on Memory Allocators?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday December 13, 2001 @08:41AM from the the-child-who-cried-'Patents!' dept.

Emery Berger asks: "I'm a PhD. student at the University of Texas and the author of Hoard, an open source memory allocator for multiprocessors. After posting information about the latest pre-release to the Hoard mailing list, I received a cease-and-desist letter from Microquill, Inc., which markets memory management software, calling for me to stop distributing Hoard. They are claiming that my latest version of Hoard, which does DLL patching when running on Windows, infringes on their patent (which actually dynamically rewrites arbitrary executables). Because DLL patching is prior art and my technique is quite different from theirs, I think I'm in the clear. However, if anyone knows of systems from 1996 or earlier based on DLL patching (or any dynamic rewriting of a running executable), especially to change the memory allocator, that would really help."

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Try GClist by Yumpee · 2001-12-13 09:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

Have you considered asking the GC mailing list? http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/gclist

Coincidentally, there have been a couple of recent queries on gclist asking about patents on GC and memory management algorithms ...

Y.