Microsoft [to patent] Verb Conjugation

streepje writes "Here [to be] the latest egregious patent application. Microsoft [to be] [to apply] for a patent for [to conjugate] verbs. Future postings [to look] like this."

Comments

Re:Oh please

[martin-boundary]

Looks like you're willfully misunderstanding the point as well. There is nothing difficult about listing all the possible conjugations of a verb: It's trivial to do it by applying the algorithms expressed in a good grammatical reference.

It's trivial to do it for a fixed language, and it's trivial to iterate over any set of candidate languages with a well defined grammar, doing it for each.

The fact that a book doesn't list all possible forms for each possible verb in an explicit table is irrelevant. The book is enough to generate those forms on demand, which is all an algorithm is required to do.

Now, there are certainly optimal (smallest number of operations, or maybe smallest RAM requirements, etc) algorithms out there which perform equivalently to any given published grammar book, but finding those is at best a cause for buying the programmers a case of beer, it's not worthy of a patent. After all, it doesn't significantly advance the state of the art.

Re:Misleading headline....

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Of course Microsoft has bullied programmers from releasing their code because it contains patents that Microsoft claims it owns. Yes, against small time people who cant afford the tens or houndred of thousands of money to get the patent revoked.

One highly publized example is VirtualDub which no longer support the .asf file format since Microsoft sent them a threat to stop VirtualDyb from using .asf files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub

So yes Microsoft has no qualms about using their patents to stop open software being developed.