On Thu, 12 May 2005, gslink wrote:
The whole business of software patents is very likely to explode at any time.
I assume this is somewhat related to the Winelib article on Slashdot:
Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/05/12/1947213.shtml
If not I'll make just a few comments about that article anyway.
* The Slashdot summary makes it sound like Wine is infringing on the patent and that we will have to remove some code. This is absolutely not the case. The infringing piece of code does not belong in Wine so noone ever even tried to put it there. Exception handling belongs in gcc and some patches exist to add this feature to gcc. But obviously the gcc developers (who are pretty strict about this stuff) never allowed this code to get into the gcc codebase. This means Wine cannot assume it's available or use it.
* Some posters on Slashdot seem to think it's a recent discovery. It's not. This issue was discussed more than a year ago. I'll let interested parties dig the wine-devel archives for the relevant threads. This also means there's no need to worry about 'plausible ignorance of th issue', it's been discussed already so the cat's out of the bag anyway.
* Some posters on Slashdot seem to think this 'discovery' is related to the recent news about Eben Moglen helping Wine. It's obviously not the case since this issue was known long before the agreement with Eben was even in the making.