Re: [Fsfe-uk] Symbian reanimates software patent debate

[Lee Braiden]

On Wednesday 19 March 2008 20:02:28 Alex Hudson wrote:
>    1. All about using DLL libraries. The idea with a DLL is that your
>       program can call functions from a library, and you have to
>       identify that function either by name or by the index into the
>       library. This patent claims a slightly different way of doing the
>       look-ups so that when libraries are changed in the future, the
>       linkage still works. (Actually, I can't claim to really understand
>       this - it seems to be a way of keeping an ABI consistent, but not
>       much of it makes sense in the context of how I understand
>       libraries to work ;)

Hmm.  If I read this correctly, it's about using a jumptable to call an 
interface that provides secondary functions -- probably in the sense of a  
provided mode parameter, or in the sense of a virtual method table, or both.  
I guess it could also apply to 

I'm no expert on (modern/unix) DLLs or patent law, but even going back to 
Amiga days, that seems like a basic and well established technique.  As I 
understand this, writing two functions, fopen_binary, and fopen_ascii, and 
then providing an interface along the lines of fopen(x, BINARY) would 
qualify, if you were using the Amiga's (forwards+backwards-compatible) way of 
interfacing with shared libraries.

-- 
Lee