[mapserver-users] Patent Challenge

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 10:25:59PM -0600, Steve Lime wrote:
> Let 'em screw around with ESRI and the other big boys. It's certainly one way to get their website noticed. I feel badly for any company that has to defend themselves against something like this.
> 
> As to being first, no way. Steve Putz and his application at Xerox where the first I ever saw do this stuff and that's what got me going. Heck in '93/'94 I was using ArcInfo/ArcPlot via Mosaic. MapServer has its roots in that system.
> 
> Anyway, gotta go patent digital scalebars, reference maps, and any other interesting feature I can come up with...
> 
> Perhaps we should trademark MapServer and MapScript.

software patents are bad for the whole software industry in general. 
In Euope the patent offices illegaly accepted some 10000 software
patents, most of them trivial as the one initiating this discussion.

Now the patent offices try hard to make software patents legally
possible in Europe. If this happens, some 10000 patents get valid
in one second.
It will end up with thousands of attacks like the one reported on this list.
To proof triviality/invalidity of a patent you usually have to expenses
of 3000-5000 Euro.

This is all a very bad situation and particular for Free Software.

You might be interested in reading more at http://www.eurolinux.org/

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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