Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 11 Aug 2002 18:26:00 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd) |
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On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Larry McVoy wrote: > > This issue is more complicated than you might think.
No, it's not. You miss the point.
> Big companies with > big pockets are very nervous about being too closely associated with > Linux because of this problem.
The point being that that is _their_ problem, and at a level that has nothing to do with technology.
I'm saying that technical people shouldn't care. I certainly don't. The people who _should_ care are patent attourneys etc, since they actually get paid for it, and can better judge the matter anyway.
Everybody in the whole software industry knows that any non-trivial program (and probably most trivial programs too, for that matter) will infringe on _some_ patent. Ask anybody. It's apparently an accepted fact, or at least a saying that I've heard too many times.
I just don't care. Clearly, if all significant programs infringe on something, the issue is no longer "do we infringe", but "is it an issue"?
And that's _exactly_ why technical people shouldn't care. The "is it an issue" is not something a technical guy can answer, since the answer depends on totally non-technical things.
Ask your legal counsel, and I strongly suspect that if he is any good, he will tell you the same thing. Namely that it's _his_ problem, and that your engineers should not waste their time trying to find existing patents.
Linus
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