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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."
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
I forsee http://patents.groklaw.net/ coming soon to a web browser near you....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.