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Microsoft Patents The Task List
theodp writes "'Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list.' Issued Tuesday, the patent covers the use of a 'task list' generated from 'TODO' comments in source code."
A beuracracy of legalities to work through before your project can ever be put in the public domain and Microsoft sueing people who bring us OSS.
Navigating all this will disuade a lot of potential help, and will only stifile Microsoft's competitors.
I can't be the only one seeing this coming.
~ Jon
Since Microsoft is going around patenting everything they can possibly think of, as long as Bush and his pro-monopoly group doesn't stay in office forever, they may help everyone else out.
If they patent enough simple and obvious ideas, that will make great fodder for the argument for abolishing software patents. They're going so far out of their way to stiffle competition that, at some point, the government will have to realize that software patents don't help competition, but hurt it.
(Yeah, I know it's the guv'ment we're talking about, but at some point congress will get enough complaints from everyone else that even they might wake up.)
Will it ever end? Funny that they get a patent on something I've been doing for 20+ years... I've always made it habit to use #TODO: in my comments for my code for pending things or things that need to be redone, then have a shell script parse my code for the comments and email them to me weekly prior to status meetings, etc. I wonder if any of these will count as "prior art" or its counterpart to fighting this atrocity?
Microsoft just patented the use of grep.
grep -r TODO * > tasklist
hopefully they won't catch me, this post infringes.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I think it's funny that Microsoft on one hand is fighting the Eolas patent, which is a stupid patent, and on the other hand is grabbing all these equally stupid patents for themselves.
I guess your left hand does know what the right hand is doing. But they have no shame...
Its going to be a joy when something important implementing Mono gets patented. Do you really doubt they are going to do it? Heck, they probably already bought a patent Sun got while doing Java.
It will be even more interesting when all of Gnome is implemented with Mono. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it ironic that a desktop environment founded because the KDE license wasn't free enough is falling over themselves to implement Microsoft technology.
The more you know, the less you understand.
It's not as broad as it might have been, but arguments about software patents in general put aside for now, the fact that you can patent something that you do (linking a list with source code comments) rather than the way that you do it (using XYZ type of code to create ABC functionality) shows that the patent system is broken.
Take, for example, the Dyson cleaner - it was a completely new way of making a vaccum cleaner and they patented their way of doing it. Other companies also did cyclone vaccums in their own ways. If Dyson had been able to patent the idea (cyclone based cleaners) rather than their implementation it would've locked out the competition completely. Why can't the patent office see this? It's what they're paid to do, after all.
This is another news post that throws crap into the face of the public. I could write the whole day comments like this and never be off-topic.
Remember our tea-throwing ancenstors. Corporations, governments cannot, must not control the people. This is another disgusting move to get to own each and every aspect of the peoples lives.
Remember the phrase "divide et impera" - it's used again one fringe minority each time. "No one cares about Microsoft but the zealots", "No one cares about civil liberties but the conspiracy nutcases", "No one cares about media consolidation but the art freaks", "No one cares about the environment but the rabid tree huggers", "No one can think $something but $fringe/criminal/outcastgroup_X"
Stop being indifferent about it. "First they came for the jews, then for them and for them and last for me", you remember that poem.
Ever asked why no one in Germany resisted Hitler? They always thought "it's not gonna be THAT worse, calm down!". They didn't believe the thing about Auschwitz even if they saw it afterwards.
--
Evan "Didn't read the article, don't really care enough to"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I cheer every time one of these insane patents is granted. There is a breaking point for all this, and every dumb patent brings us an inch closer to the mainstream calling it all into question. The dumber the better.
I just hope we don't destroy the economy beforehand.
Cheers.
Well, Eclipse and its users are in trouble then, because the patent application in question has been filed over 4 years ago. Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations. And another reminder to all software users - you are not immune from patent lawsuits if the software you are using (whether closed or open source) is violating other(s') patent(s) and neither you or your software vendor have a license to use or distribute the patented "technology."
Actually this is a bloody good patent, one that actually makes sense and is worth patenting.
Yes. If it wasn't so bloody obvious.
I personally have been using $ToDo, $Review, and $Kludge comments in my code for a while now. I only recently started using a perl script to extract them. I guess that makes me in violation of the patent.
But the real question is... who's to know? This seems like an in-house development tool (that's how I use it). It's not like this going to show up in a shipping product (well I guess it could in some development tool).
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Good grief. I think we need to institute some kind of reasonable editorial policy here. As is so often the case in articles about Microsoft or patents, the lead is patently misleading.
//TODO *.c". It's about a smart IDE offering a useful and creative way of managing tasks. Should software processes be patentable? Maybe not. Are they? Yes. Does this infringe on prior art? Not really. So might this be a patentable software process? Sure looks like it.
The patent is on a relatively complex system that I've never seen or heard of before. It's about an IDE tool that dynamically identifies syntax errors and TODO comments throughout your code, associates them with named tasks and gives them priorities.
It is not about the little notebook you keep next to your computer, nor about running "grep
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago, I suggest you speak up now...
I don't think we'll be hearing much.
Your attempt at making it seem like an innovation is dissappointing even for Microsoft standards. Where's the jargoned up spiel about M$'s new paradigms and methods? That .NET reference and the mention of different languages, as if other compiler collections did not exist is a start. Oh wait, a new method is not something that deserves a patent is it? Now I see part of the problem. Let's see what you have again:
Others may have it, but it's one of those quiet innovations MS has they don't make too much noise about. Like Autocomplete (can't run across a single browser nowadays that doesn't have this).
Noise? Do you mean documentation? M$ surely has enough advertising.
Your claim that Microsoft invented this feature which is just now getting stuck into their products is preposterous. People have been doing this forever and it's outrageous that Microsoft would attempt to steal such an obvious idea from everyone else.
I like the way that KDE's IDE autogenerates html helpfiles and other documentation just like this. I'd like to see those morons at Microsoft try to extort money from anyone who would like to use or distribute KDE. Actually, I would not. I really want them to just take their ill gotten gains and leave the rest of us alone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The topic seems a little alarmist concerning patenting #TODOs in source code. After reading the article, it doesn't seem that outrageous of a patent. Putting code/greps in to find TODO's and saving them off is trivia. Going the extra mile and cataloging them, managing them and "removing after the task has been completed" is complex and a little ingenious . While I appreciate the article, who ever posted this to slashdot should have summarized it without all this chicken little tactics.
We all know development at microsoft has stopped for IE, Longhorn is not comming along, we know MS market-share is falling, and recent
With all that cash lying around, and 'doing business' gets you problems in the EU, it might be better to change from a 'software' business to a 'investment'-business...
Less hassle, less employees, less lawsuits..
To keep it in a
No, they were all conditioned and believed firmly they are being attacked and threatened by the Jewish minority. No kidding, they would have sworn it was them who began the aggression and could have counted a looong list what they had done to them. That it all was faked and made up by the regime to incite hate and to create a scapegoat would not have sprung to their minds. And yes, they believed their newspapers were still independent. They believed anti-semitism and the assault on neighboring Poland was a kind of revenge on those who attacked them.
And so many people believe it is the Arabs who started a kind of war with the US and that a war on terror or torturing them in concentration camps is fair "revenge" for something "the Arabs" (all 800 million of them?) had supposedly done.
Add to that the incarceration without lawyer or notice, torture, prison camps outside the borders (like many German camps back then, most of them were in former Poland!) media and population control, a "war on everything" and you're pretty close on what kind of state 1936's Germany was in.
The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone
:D
runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it
first.
Just like someone patented sucking dust through a bit of cloth, and now every
house has one of these wonder-machines. There was a patent filed not long back
in the UK for using two little bits of plastic to stop shopping bags slicing
your fingers off. Now *THAT* was obvious - hundreds of people were doing that
with bits of plastic and cartons for years. Patenting it makes it commercially
someone's, as opposed to "used only in your own personal little world"
There are housewives and street bums inventing shit that is *so* obvious, but
they're the only people who go and try. Why? Maybe they're less cynical than
us. When we think "it's obvious!!!!!", we tend to think it's been done before.
Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it has. You gotta check first
By the way, your comments in code are not at risk. Neither is your perl script.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.
The Eclipse method may not even be at risk, since the patent MS have filed is
quite rightly quite specific in it's application, and does a lot of things
Eclipse does not.
Neko
Of course it's helpful, that's one reason it's an outrage that it's been patented. There are lots of ways to do this and it's a common practice. Oh yeah, that it's obvious and common practice is another reason it's an outrage.
Is Microsoft now going to demand that KDE not distribute similar features with their IDE? Are posters here going to be threatened for recommending "grep TODO *.c > tasklist"? What dorks they are.
BS like this is the death rattle of any IT company. The sooner they go away, the happier everyone else is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Exactly, the idea of patenting an idea is nonsensical. Why software cannot be covered by anything over and above copyright law is beyond me. Look at Amazon, and the "One-Click Shopping" debaucle - how is the idea of a company storing credit card information patentable? Why is this something that other companies would not want to do anyway?
At the moment none of this applies to Europe, but this will soon change for the worse.
Now, where did I put my "Non-face-to-face communications" patent application?
Doxygen http://www.doxygen.org tags can be used to do lists on TODO since 1997. A nice example can is http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/lists.html
If you want to know what the heck patents cover, read the damned "CLAIMS". If it isn't in the CLAIMS then the patent doesn't cover it.
Sheesh, just because a patent describes something in the abstract or specification section that sounds rather broad doesn't mean that is what the patent ACTUALLY covers.
rtfm
Right now I'm excluding stories about patents in my preferences page.
FYI - you are now beginning to get a tase of the new Microsoft Linux strategy.
That is - patent the daylights out of everything, hopeing to catch, snag, and delay Linux somewhere along the way. (Well you didn't actually expect them to innovate did you?)
The next frontier in liberty - Project Libertopia
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it first.
I figure that if I can (and did) come with it independently, then it must be obvious. The fact that the inventor chose to pursue a patent has no bearing on whether it is obvious or not.
This is not a case of hearing about an idea and saying "Oh that's obvious". This is a case of lot's of people (not just me) saying "I've been doing that for years."
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
As far as I recall, Eclipse didnt start doing this till well after 2000 when this patent was applied for. That being said, I dont think Microsoft has ever filed a patent lawsuit?
Dude, no one competes with IBM on patents, they have averaged more than a patent a day for as long as any currently enforceable patent has been in existance. That is one game even Gates won't try. It would be like trying to win a land war in China, you might suceed for a while but eventually the sheer mass of your opponent will wear you down.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It patents differentiating between different lengths of time
holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or
application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons
on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
Kind of like the digital watch I had in 1979? Or the bike computer I had ten years ago?
I really don't understand how they got that patent. It flunks both the prior art and "obvious" requirements.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Lets be fair. We all know microsoft loses a lot of money from copying other people's IP. MS is creating a huge portfolio of things everyone who writes software will be in violation of one of them. MS is creating these patents not to attack innocent people, but to defend it's illegal activities.
I do security
with the USPTO
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
What they actually get their money for is issuing patents.
And they are proud of the fact that they're one of the few parts of government that is a revenue center.
And other parts of government are hungry for their revenue.
This is one of those cases where following the bottom line is going to get you the wrong result.
Tweet, tweet.
Original thought*
.... somehow I doubt I'll get used to burned toast no matter how much jam is on it.
*Parent Pending
I suppose we'll start to see "Microsoft Brand Bread(TM)" on the stores next. "Because "Microsoft Brand Bread(TM)" is the right bread for your "Microsoft Brand Smart-Toaster(TM)".
"Microsoft Brand Smart-Toaster(TM)"
"Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations."
This is NOT what one should do when implementing a feature in a program. First of all, developers should not be wasting time with the legal side of software. Most developers do not care for patents. Second, the moment a developer starts sifting through patent portfolios, they are both seeing a solution from the point of view of another developer(s) (or lawyers) and may have a hard time getting past this "better" option and sticking with their own, and they now can not legally say they had no idea the patent existed. I have heard before that even patent lawyers suggest that an inventor/developer not search through patents. What is a developer, a lawyer? No, they are interested in solving problems. Engineers are not interested in making things more complex (and you can not argue that law is about making things simple). Although the process itself may be complex, it is not in the interest of developers and such to complicate things. Fear is what I see in your entire post. Scare tactics. FUD, whatever you want to call it. Let me repeat, DEVELOPERS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS, etc. ARE NOT INTERESTED IN COMPLICATING THINGS. They seek the truth and/or they build machines/software/ideas to solve problems or understand a problem(or event). How many great scientists/developers/engineers do you know that support the patent system? Yes, some will say that we need it, but that it is currently flawed. Yet, even they will admit that they don't have the solution. There have been economists and various other social science professionals on the other hand that are against the idea of the patent system. First you must understand the reasons the patent system was created and why it still exists. You can spout the old myths about progress due to the patent system, but I dare you to show me scientifically (or any other possible, but convincing way) that patents are directly related to progress and I'll give my apologies. I'm very sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of the ignorance behind this patent issue. It is bad enough that people support the system, but to recommend that developers go spend their time sifting through patent files? If the patent system was unenforced though, it would be a great system for sharing knowledge related to inventing/engineering/etc.
Question everything.
MS is creating these patents not to attack innocent people, but to defend it's illegal activities.
Doesn't that usually involve attacking innocent people/companies?
The problem is that the whole way the USPTO works is that it is geared towards passing patents.
Specificly, its better finantially for the PTO to pass a patent than to reject it.
This has to change before anything good will happen.
Simply change the way the PTO works so that its no longer finantially better for the PTO to pass a patent than it is to reject it.
Then (assuming they do what they are supposed to and use patent examiners who are qualified in the field they are examining patents in), crap like this wont be granted patents anymore.
I forsee http://patents.groklaw.net/ coming soon to a web browser near you....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.
You know what, that is obvious. If there isn't something that constitutes prior art already out there it's simply because the number of approaches a finite number of programs can implement is well finite, obvious things are going to be left unimplemented!
As to patents, vacuum cleaners as far as I know were a legitimate invention and deserved patents. You know what, if back at the very dawn of the computer industry someone had patented the idea of a compiler translating a high level language to machine code or making an OS to simplify the computing environment I may not object, as far as I know those were fundamental advances at the time. The best fundamental advancements I can think of recently are compile once/run anywhere languages (eg java) and tabbed browsing. But compile once languages are simlpy a natural extension of portable code and documents that can be opened by systems on different platforms, tabbed browsing is just moving tabs into a different part of userspace. Both were innovative but moreso made practical by the maturation of technology and their respective projects, heck I'm sure both ideas had been "invented" thousands of times before by a bunch of CS students blabbing to eachother after a few beers. Neither in my opinion are worthy of patents as it was just a race to implementation and this MS patent which is far more obvious, just more specific, is certainly not deserving of a patent.
I stole this Sig
How can this one be legit? I've been doing this for years! /* TODO: add extra format checking */
hostname$ grep TODO *
Inconceivable!
That Microsoft is compiling an even bigger list, legal one at that too. This list will show evrey one who has ever written "Hello World" about innovation. From now on *no one* will be able to make the same mistakes as M$ or well they will sue you.
;)
The great thing about this is that it will not stop people from coding or collaborating on a job it will just make evreyone aware of what they can't do and do something else. With as far as we've come do we really want to reinvent the icon and desktop. Not really. Slowly but surely M$ doesn't even realize what they are doing. The feel they are "protecting" their "investments" but what they are really doing is influencing something people have wanted since they mastered the SINGLE click
Innovation...
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Sounds like a task list to me. You add tasks from the code, and tick them off when done.
In defense of the beast, they've been getting hit with bad patent law suits worse than anyone.
To name a few from the last couple years:
There was the incredibly broad Eolas patent.
There was the burst patent.
There was the down right stupid DRM patent.
There were a couple hand held device patents.
There was the supposed "relational database" patent, which really offended me.
And others.
If I were getting sued anywhere near as much as they are, you better believe I would patent every stupid feature I came up with.
Yet, in most of these stupid patent cases that actually make it to court, they lose. And they keep losing.
Not that they can't afford it.
It's the principle, I guess.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
grep -r '^TODO:' source/
so complex.
Patents were created to allow an inventor to have exclusive use of their invention for a limited amount of time to encorage people to put effort into inventing things. What the patent system was not designed for is to encorage people to take patents on things that other people have invented or are obvious through normal human intuition. An inventor is someone who creates something new that will really help consumers. An inventor is not simply someone who puts through paperwork for things that seem obvious. If this was what the patent system was for it would be pointless because it would only be a device for promoting monopolies rather than encouraging innovation.
Personally I think that if someone deserves a 16 year monopoly it is because they have put the time and persperation into an invention and achieved something that may never have been achieved if they didn't, simply marketing an obvious concept hardly qualifies.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
What bullshit. The internet would've come about with or without Gore, just as the automobile would've flourished whether or not Ford decided to go into the business. Gore's contribution was an accident of timing and position, nothing else. If it hadn't been Gore, it would've been some other little asshole making the same stupid claims.
Inventions happen. Useful inventions tend to happen even when other people try to put a stop to them. Individual efforts can speed things along, or slow them down, but they rarely, if ever, change the progress of technology. The 'Great Man' theory of history has pretty much been discredited, except by those who wish to think of themselves as 'great men' - or who have a hard-on for worshipping those they consider 'great men'.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Personally I like to write my grocery list in X86 assembly. Funny how once I get past the data section I know what I am going to buy before I push it to all my registers.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling