Re: [SLUG] Patents and OSS Development

[Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd-slug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

James Purser wrote:

> I've put this on the linux-aus list but I thought I might throw it up
> here and see what sort of response I get.
> 
> Does anybody know of, or are involved in projects that have been
> hampered by software patents.

I am the main author of libsndfile:

    http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

which reads and writes a large number of audio file formats. One 
common format not supported is MP3. MP3 encoding is covered by
patents and I therefore shied away from adding MP3 because I would
not be able to read and write that format.

In a former job as a hardware design engineer I came up with an idea 
to solve a particular problem. The company I was working for at the 
time decided not to pursue my idea because there was a patent that
on a similar idea.

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Yes it's valid)
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"The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by
accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides
a structured way to write spaghetti code." -- Paul Graham