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Microsoft's Decade-old Patent On Tree-view Mode!
BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear part."
It appears we have stunning commentary on the nature of software patents. If a company, "first posts," if you will, they get the right to license the patent to others and sue those that don't pay them royalties. Truly, parent is a modern genius of metaphor.
Good thing it's already over a decade old. That means it'll be coming into public domain anyway in a few years.
Good thing patents haven't been made nearly eternal, like copyright has. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, though. Then we can really kiss any innovation in this country goodbye.
E.g. swing on vms sig tapes, back in 1980s, published with source. Limited width due to
terminal size, but functions were there.
But microsoft needs lots of defensive patents, gets sued by trolls all the time.
Hopefully new USPTO position about software that does nothing material and only is for general purpose machines not being patentable will hold. That would clear out many junk patents.
I have to give MS kudos for not using this patent offensively.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Maybe because they own the site? Put up patent on ad-filled site, link to Slashdot with 'M$ is teh Evil' summary, and profit without the need of resorting to ??? anywhere in your business plan.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Generally, very little. Yes, most low-level things in CS have been patented in some sense (XOR cursors, one-click checkout, run-length image encoding, multi-hash lookup, stacktrace error display strategies.)
In theory, all software development grinds to a halt. In practice, no one gives a damn.
Trying to enforce a very broad software patent usually just gets the entire patent invalidated. Even if you win, you get to play whack-a-mole with a thousand open-source projects. And most software is bespoke stuff within corporations: good luck tracking that down to enforce patent claims.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court. Bad press, skeptical judge (unless you are suing a direct competitor,) workarounds from the peanut gallery provided pro-bono, countersuits from others with overlapping clainms: it gets ugly fast. Better to just cross-license and get on with life.
I patented trees in general in 1992. I'm going to sue.
That's kind of an interesting point here, they were granted the patent in '97 but I fail to recall any lawsuits over such a thing... Much ado about nothing?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I had a real ugly dog, so ugly that we had to shave his ass and teach him to walk backwards, ,otherwise other dogs and people avoided him completely.
this together with tying a pork chop around his neck to get the other dogs to play with him ,
Improved his quality of life and desirability considerably. .
In looking for patent violations I found
1) Shaving the ass of anything alive or dead is patented, by some sheep herder
2) Walking backwards due to physical repulsiveness is patented and requires that you use their prosthetic device snd pay them a
fee for using it
3) Affixing anything edbile to any living thing to make it more desirable in any way is also patented
So I had to shoot the dog when I was sued for 2 of the 3 violations above
I saved myself $ 10,000 in lawsuits but paid a fine of $30,000 for shooting the dog,
The above showes how the economics of patents work .
To win any patent is simple Econmics
You must just have MUCH more money than those who take claim to it
IT Doesn't matter at all who is right
Wealth always PROVES RIGHT is the message sent by the US courts.
Well reading the claims they aren't talking about a treeview file system anyway; they seem to be talking about the system of non-file namespace extensions similar to how they show "Desktop" as a node at a level where it is not in the FS, and "Network", "Control Panel", etc. that can all show up in their Treeview controls interspersed with file system objects. I don't believe Norton Commander or XTree did that. They also are claiming a system of registering these namespace add-ins. None of that seems like any attempt to patent a simple treeview of the file system.
I would expect that no lawsuits would be pending, or ever brought to surface - for a few reasons.
1) They are far from the first to implement such a feature... too much prior art existed
2) One of the companies that made excessive use of "Tree View" was IBM, when they rewrote OS/2's GUI (without MS's involvement) for OS/2 v2 - which far predates both the application date of this patent and the granted date.
I doubt they want to sue IBM for something they (Microsoft) did not come up with.
I also doubt they want to sue anyone else, because doing so would invariably bring IBM into the picture for such reasons (listed in #2 above), as well as force IBM (and others) to bring up the prior existence of such a "structure" which would thus be ground to invalidate Microsoft's patent.
I am sure that IBM did not come up with this idea - but they did implement it long before Microsoft filed for a patent, and I am sure that the OS/2 GUI patents do cover it, and reference prior art as well.
This is a (pandora's) box that I doubt Microsoft wants to open. Instead, I think they will use it (or may have been using it, or may consider to use it) for nothing other than trying to force smaller companies without the legal wherewithal to pay them royalties for a technology they did not create.
Just my opinions.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades".
FYI, in addition of "/dev/" which *is* a directory on the file system (but contains special files to communicates with the hardware), there are other things that *are not* in the file system.
The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view.
There are entry point in the tree like "/proc" which aren't in the file system at all.
Instead they use a special module called PROCFS (it's a file system drive in unix world, and pretty much equivalent to the the extension that the patent mentions : both can be used to make structures not on a disk appear as directory-like tree)
and expose a complete directory-like structure which in fact doesn't represent files, but represent processes, kernel status, etc.
See the above post for a reference on a paper about how exposing processes with an interface that look likes files.
In short : if there's a directory called "/dev/snd/" this directory exists because it is on the EXT2 partition mounted there. The directory "/proc/kernel/" exist because the procfs modules makes it available. It has no existance on the disk.
Similar mapping of abstract concept into something that "looks like a directory tree" is very popular in unix.
More recent example are pts which is used to represent the various (virtual) terminals in directory-like fashion structure. usb exposing the topology of usb devices. Also sysfs in linux is used to represent pretty much anything internel of the kernel like system drivers.
Most of the example I give are recent (usbfs and sysfs are post 95), but they are representative of a tendency that has existed in Unix for a long time because it was in its design.
The patent covers the software mecanism which covers the possibility that was introduced in Windows 1995:
Using a simple file browsing software like Explorer, you access a single tree structure which can hold both actual elements on the disk like "Desktop -> My Computer -> C:" (gives access to a physical partition), and things that are actually abstract element made visible in the same tree "Desktop -> My Computer -> Control Pannel -> {some settings}" (whose functionality is coincidentally is pretty much close to what Linux's recent "sysfs" or parts of the mid-80s old unix "procfs" where created to do).
(And somewhere in between, the case of network resources, which are remote resource made visible in the local tree : Windows' "Desktop -> Network Neighbourhood -> {variable number of indirections depending on Windows version} -> {server} -> {ressource}" is exactly functionally equivalent to a unix' mounted remote file system)
So in short, my opinion about the patent :
"Congratulation, you've successfully described something that has been in Unix for the past 25 years"
----
In fact Unix' original implementation is much closer to what the patent describes than Windows 95 (that microsoft where trying to patent) : /proc really exposes things that where never part of the file system to begin with.
Speaking of system settings and internal data
Whereas the functionally equivalent "Desktop -> My Computer -> Control Pannel" trick simply lists all ".cpl" files in "\\windows\\system[32]\\". It's not an extension that make out-of-filesystem object visible in the tree, it's simply a thing that acts as a filter for files already elsewhere on the same system.
In addition, the old unix implementation I am referring to is better integrated in the OS. Anything made available in the tree using a special filesystem driver that exposes abstract things instead of actual filesystems, is instantly made available to any of the usual tools (including command-line tools) used to ha
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