[gclist] speaking of patents...

[Florian Weimer]

"Emery Berger" <emery@cs.utexas.edu> writes:

>> You're writing from an .edu address.  At least here in Germany, you
>> cannot infringe patents by publishing research results.  Is this
>> different in the US?
>
> I don't know, but in any case, I am distributing software, not just
> publishing research results.

Is this mutually exclusive, especially if you publish source code?
I'm not sure.

> The patent numbers are 5949972 and 6035426. You can look these up at
> http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm.

The second patent describes technology used in Purify (published by
Rational nowadays, I think).

Are you sure the patents are the correct ones?  Quote:

| The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for
| replacing the heap implementation in an existing executable computer
| program at runtime.

libhoard replaces the heap implementation at link time, so it's not
infringing this patent.  Or am I missing something?