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The sad thing about software patents | 484 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The sad thing about software patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 01:28 PM EDT
The sad thing about software patents is that every techinical person knows
absolutely and for certain that they are invalid. Especially the ones in this
case.

The only people that think software patents are valid are lawyers, judges,
politicians, and the jurors that they lie to.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dynamic Symbolic Lookup Patent as describe By Van Nest closing comments: Prior Art 1970's
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 02:05 PM EDT
IIRC, TOPS-10 did a similar thing- compile/assemble output was a relocatable
file (.rel) which you could load and run, or you could load & save it into a
.sav file and later run that. (You could also start a program, have it pause,
save that, and later start from where you left off. The original ADVENT program
used that to speed up the game startup.)

TOPS-10 also had the basic concept of a shared run-time library (the
"hi-seg"), which was not part of the .sav file but was statically
linked during the save process and loaded at run time.

I still have some TOPS-10 books on the shelf :).

z!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dynamic Symbolic Lookup Patent as describe By Van Nest closing comments: Prior Art 1970's
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 04:09 PM EDT
Did the substitution happen in the instructions?
The patent in this trial covers specifically symbolic references in the
instruction (which has the side effect of making the instructions variable
length, which is why no one actually implements this patent).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dynamic Symbolic Lookup Patent as describe By Van Nest closing comments: Prior Art 1970's
Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 04:29 PM EDT
Reading over the PTO's response to the prior art offered by Google, the
strongest prior art was from Gries' 1971 textbook on compiler design and
construction. The important element that the PTO took from that, which was not
in one of the other prior arts that Google submitted, a book on the internals of
a Lisp compiler, was that the patent is about a compiler producing intermediate
code (in the case of Java the byte code), resolving the symbol references and
making changes to the intermediate code instructions before either interpreting
the intermediate code or converting them further to native code before
executing.

Some of the claims in '104 talk about changing the actual instructions of the
intermediate code, and Gries was not held to invalidate those claims. But other
claims talk only about changing the reference from symbolic to numeric, i.e.,
changing the reference in a table that is used by the instruction via
indirection, and Gries was held to cover that.

The Lisp compiler did its symbolic reference resolution steps after the
production of native code, so it was not accepted as prior art by the
reexaminer.

So for the purpose of the '104 patent look for something with either an
interpreter or a two-step compilation into an intermediate form with symbolic
reference resolution being applied before interpretation of intermediate code or
the production of native code instructions.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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