Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)

Linus Torvalds
2002-08-12T01:34:29Z

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> This issue is more complicated than you might think.

No, it's not. You miss the point.

> Big companies with
> big pockets are very nervous about being too closely associated with
> Linux because of this problem.

The point being that that is _their_ problem, and at a level that has
nothing to do with technology.

I'm saying that technical people shouldn't care. I certainly don't. The
people who _should_ care are patent attourneys etc, since they actually
get paid for it, and can better judge the matter anyway.

Everybody in the whole software industry knows that any non-trivial
program (and probably most trivial programs too, for that matter) will
infringe on _some_ patent. Ask anybody. It's apparently an accepted fact,
or at least a saying that I've heard too many times.

I just don't care. Clearly, if all significant programs infringe on
something, the issue is no longer "do we infringe", but "is it an issue"?

And that's _exactly_ why technical people shouldn't care. The "is it an
issue" is not something a technical guy can answer, since the answer
depends on totally non-technical things.

Ask your legal counsel, and I strongly suspect that if he is any good, he
will tell you the same thing. Namely that it's _his_ problem, and that
your engineers should not waste their time trying to find existing
patents.

Linus