LeslieOrchard links to a story where Apple seems to be trying to patent RSS _ Atom feed aggregation technology. ¹ Read the comments. It may not be as bad as it sounds. Although, when I start reading claim 1 of the patent application ² I can’t honestly say that I understand what the limits of it are. Store bookmark in folder, store another bookmark in folder, display the merged feed._
I guess that the feed merging used by Oddmuse cannot be implemented using bookmarks stored in folders.
DaveWiner also comments at the end of a paragraph in a remotely related post of his:
They built on the generous openness of the publishing industry, and never said thanks, and then lied about their own openness and reserved for themselves the right to decide who can read their content. And so far, they’re geting away with it. ³
Repeat after me: Software Patents – BAD!
At work, I was also skimming articles; one of them mentioned that AT&T had not spoken up when the MPEG-4 group asked for holders of patents to speak up, waited until it got popular, and then sued everybody who used it. I just found an ArsTechnica article about this via Google. ⁴ The magazine I was browsing at work, and the ArsTechnica artible both also mentioned a similar case about JPEG, and the ArsTechnica goes on to talk about the problems with the GIF file format.
Repeat after me: Software Patents – BAD! BAD!
#Patents