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Torvalds Joins Anti-Patent Attack

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the patents-schmatents dept.

canuck57 sent us a story about Linus Torvalds has joined the chorus of voices speaking out against software patents. Talks briefly about the recent patent releases by IBM & Sun, and notes that there are 'an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 registered software patents in the U.S. alone.'

2 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:any software patent is bad by CAIMLAS · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I was sitting here reading this comment and thought, "hey, that's pretty insiteful; I htink I'll reply" and then I realized I'd written it not 5 minutes ago.

    Lay off the crack, man... lay off the crack. /puts the crack pipe down

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  2. Linus has software patents with Transmeta! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    This is interesting coming from a person who is a co-inventor on three patents held by Transmeta, listed below. All of these patents claim a software component or algorithm that could hamper the process of writing binary translation software. Some of the claims are not even novel (or non-obvious IMHO). This could easily affect open source software like qemu, valgrind and various JIT virtual machines.

    Linus' patents:

    6,714,904 "System for using rate of exception event generation during execution of translated instructions to control optimization of the translated instructions"

    6,615,300 "Fast look-up of indirect branch destination in a dynamic translation system"

    6,594,821 "Translation consistency checking for modified target instructions by comparing to original copy"