I'd be interested in what others think of OSS developers patenting what they can as a defensive move. These could be immediately be licensed to any Open Source (tm) (GPL, BSD etc) implementation and used defensively against claims of infringement on other patents.
I'm saddened to actually be proposing more software patents, but it appears that in this case you may have to engage in this game to avoid problems. I don't feel entirely comfortable in couting on Big Blue's patent potfolio to check Microsoft shenanigans.
Is this really an inherant problem with GC? The existence of incremental GC has been mentioned by others (though I don't know where it has been implemented). This should be fine except for the most finicky code. For these it would seem fairly easy to implement a CG system that could be turned off for critical operations. This would raise the problem of not being able to allocate memory, but this could be addressed by specifying an amount of memory to reserve before GC is turned off, leaving the responsibility for observing those limits in the hands of the coder until CG is restored.
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I'd be interested in what others think of OSS developers patenting what they can as a defensive move. These could be immediately be licensed to any Open Source (tm) (GPL, BSD etc) implementation and used defensively against claims of infringement on other patents. I'm saddened to actually be proposing more software patents, but it appears that in this case you may have to engage in this game to avoid problems. I don't feel entirely comfortable in couting on Big Blue's patent potfolio to check Microsoft shenanigans.
Is this really an inherant problem with GC? The existence of incremental GC has been mentioned by others (though I don't know where it has been implemented). This should be fine except for the most finicky code. For these it would seem fairly easy to implement a CG system that could be turned off for critical operations. This would raise the problem of not being able to allocate memory, but this could be addressed by specifying an amount of memory to reserve before GC is turned off, leaving the responsibility for observing those limits in the hands of the coder until CG is restored.