ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>   It's friggen insane that they're choosing to enforce the patent NOW,
> after so many years.
> 

No, I call it the "Unisys theory".

Many years ago Hoffman encoding was used for the AT&T pack(1) command.
AT&T used it, BSD used it, Sun used it, etc.  and it had been published
in many books.  It was a first-year computing problem to write a Hoffman
encoder and decoder.

Sooooo....in about the 19th year of the 20-year patent, Unisys (by now
the owner of the patent) raised their ugly head and threatened to block
shipments of Unix systems because of this.

The people at AT&T looked at this, blinked, and then wrote the
"compress" command.   The compress command decompressed Hoffman encoded
files, but when they were re-compressed it used a different
(un-patented) algorithm.  It seems there was never any patent taken out
on the decompression technique, only the compression technique.

A lot of patent holders will hold off suing someone until the market is
built and companies have a lot to lose.  It is easier to get them to pay
up that way. Nothing in the law says they can not do that.

md