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Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the cheese-with-your-wine dept.

davidwr writes "UKBuilder.com reports that Borland's structured exception handling (SEH) patent affects Winelib. Winelib allows you to compile Windows-targeted code to run natively on Linux. Because of the patent, gcc does not include support for SEH, which is widely used in the MS-Windows world. There are workarounds, but you won't like them."

6 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Is that ironic by MajorDick · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since Borland USED Winelib in Kylix.....

    Amazing how thing like this rear their head AFTER a company that holds the Patent actually used the app in their OWN product, can you say STINGY

  2. GCC list discussion by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course this was discussed on the gcc list, the thread starts here.

    Links to an implementation of this can be found in this mail, the legality of this implementation is discussed in the followup.

    The inevitable prior-art discussion begins here.

  3. What patent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is the patent in question.

  4. VMS was doing this in the 80's by valderost · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hopefully somebody investigates OpenVMS as potential prior art here. The OpenVMS Condition Handling Facility provides substantially the same exception-handling functionality as SEH and has had much of it since the 80's. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/72final/5841/5841pro _038.html#chf_vaxalpha

  5. FUD? by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Informative

    until 4.0, gcc's backend was entirely and deliberately undocumented
    My first thought was, gee, that's not been my experience--as I recall, although it was complicated, it was rather well documented. So I did a bit of Google and found that other people seemed to agree with me (i.e., they say things like "Furthermore, compared to the other compiler projects, GCC offered the most comprehensive documentation for backend porters." and so forth).

    The only thing I could find that even sort of suport your claim was RMS's thing about not wanting the backend to drift into becoming an LGPL black-box (thus chilling the development of new GPL'd front ends).

    So, do you care to back your claim up?

    --MarkusQ

  6. Re:There's an uber-workaround by perrin · · Score: 4, Informative

    > Europe (as of now) has no software patents.

    Wrong. The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued thousands of software patents. There are just doubts as to their enforcability, and several member countries do not accept them at all. This is what the new EU directive (CIID) is all about.