Re: overloaded function handles

[John W. Eaton]

If we know that some part of Octave is likely to infringe on a patent,
then I think we should either find a non-infringing way to implement
the feature, or remove the code that is likely to be infringing.

The MathWorks has sued at least one other company for patent
infringement.  See for example the recent case against COMSOL, which
appears to still be pending.

Perhaps more troubling than the patent case is the related breech of
contract and copyright infringement case which the MathWorks won.
Part of the claims of that case were apparently about "software
copyrightability, including the copyrightability of a compilation of
software commands, command names, and command syntax".  The result of
the judgement was apparently several million dollars in damages and a
permanent injunction against distributing COMSOL script (the
Matlab-like environment written and distributed by COMSOL).  BTW,
COMSOL is apparently a Swedish company which also does business in the
US.  So simply being based outside the US apparently doesn't allow you
to do whatever you like and to completely disregard US copyright and
patent laws.

It is up to you whether you want to distribute a patch separately from
Octave, but I think it would be best to remove any code that we think
infringes on any patent from the core Octave distribution.

In the case of MathWorks patents, it will be hard to claim ignorance
of one of their patents since they are listed on the MathWorks web
site.  Not that ignorance of a patent helps us anyway, since
independent invention is not a valid defense in patent infringement
cases.

If you think it is impossible to implement the feature in a
non-infringing way, then I guess that is a clear example of the
trouble software patents can cause.  Perhaps we should use this as a
way to clearly show people in the numerical software community why
software patents are harmful to users, and why members of our
community should not be rewarding the MathWorks for this kind of
behavior.  I suspect most Matlab users don't even know anything about
the litigation the MathWorks has been involved with in recent years.

jwe