[wellylug] new MS software patent application

[Brent Wood]

This patent application by Microsoft is perhaps the biggest threat to the
software industry to date.

I don't know of a single useful program )outside of the ubiquitous "hello
world" variants) which doesn't have some sort of conditional which is likely to
use this.

In this patent application, M$ are trying to own the IsNot operator. Although
the William Gates approach lends itself to an I_Snot takeoff :-)

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220040230959%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20040230959&RS=DN/20040230959

Like the recent FAT patent, it is likely that MS would use this for income
rather than litigation purposes (charging digital camera, cellphone & memory
stick manufacturors 25c per device for the use of the FAT filesystem for
data/image storage is not a crippling cost, but is still revenue for MS.


Brent Wood