[Discuss] OSHW questions

[j. eric townsend]

On 11/18/2012 11:19 PM, Dave Boyhan wrote:
>
> This is not legal advice. We are not establishing a lawyer client
> relationship.  I am not a patent lawyer.

And as I learned to say 11 years ago at TiVo, "I am not a lawyer and 
this is not legal advice or legal opinion.:"

> Just publish  to nullify possibility of a patent.

This is something I was taught in the late 80s when I first started 
working with open source software.  In short, "get your idea out there 
and public as soon as you can and don't sweat patents".

I didn't really understand this until I got in the business of tinkering 
with firearms design and discovered early patents that are hard to 
comprehend in today's market.  Imagine if Mosaic had a full patent on 
the idea of a "web browser" or Liquid Audio had a patent on "buying 
music on the Internet".  There was an early patent on "the revolver" 
that covered, well, the basic idea of a revolver.  Now imagine that 
Apple won their patent/copyright lawsuits over GUI in the late 80s and 
early 90s...

-- 
J. Eric Townsend
design: www.allartburns.org; hacking: www.flatline.net;  HF: KG6ZVQ
PGP: 0xD0D8C2E8 AC9B 0A23 C61A 1B4A 27C5 F799 A681 3C11 D0D8 C2E8