Creating "prior art" (was Re: Craig Mundie/Dave Stutz...) [DotGNU]Authentication against Microsoft's "Passport" system?)

[Norbert Bollow]

Dan Kuykendall <address@hidden> wrote:

> > You missed a critical rapid exchange that happened between Mundie and
> > Brian Berhlendorf in which Brian asked about patents covering hailstorm,
> > and if Microsoft had any that they would use against free software
> > developers who try and duplicate hailstorm. Mundie said "yes".

Barry Fitzgerald <address@hidden> replied:

> Hmmm... you're right, I did miss that :( ...
> 
> Well, we can't say we didn't see it coming... 

How does this affect our strategy?

I think we need to (as quickly as possible) create "prior art"
that covers all essential parts of what DotGNU wants to do.

I think that this can be done by writing pseudo-code for DotGNU
and publishing in on the internet.

This pseudo-code doesn't need to be anywhere close to something
that can be compiled, and it doesn't need to be free of
programming errors.  It just needs to "invent" all the
functionality that we need.

I think it will be fun to write this pseudo-code -- because in
doing this, we don't need to worry about all the nasty little
problems that normally take so much time.  (All those nasty
little problems have been solved before in various ways, so it
will be no problem to find "prior art" convering those if
necessary.)

Besides protecting us from patents, I think that doing a first
pseudo-implementation of DotGNU in high-level pseudo-code is
also a very useful strategy that will ultimately allow us to
save a lot of time because problems with the high-level design
can be found and fixed before much time is spent on the details.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
A member of FreeDevelopers and the DotGNU Core Team   http://dotgnu.org
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet  (near Zurich, Switzerland)
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