[Sheflug] Microsoft patent

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Owen" == A V Le Blanc <LeBlanc [at] mcc.ac.uk> writes:

    Owen> I see in the Debian news lists that Microsoft have patented
    Owen> the idea of updating software over the internet using a
    Owen> package management system; this appears to conflict with
    Owen> Debian's dpkg as well as Red Hat's rpm system,

If Claim 1 is a complete description of the system in question, then I
don't see how dpkg and rpm infringe.  The system describe in Claim 1
is automatic and calendar-triggered (actually, it sounds a lot like
many viruses); Linux package managers are neither.

Users who set up a cron job to update everything may be infringing,
though ;-)

But let's get serious; all partial mirroring software evidently
infringes this claim.

In fact, Jeff Friedl (_Mastering Regular Expressions_) had published a
self-updating `httpget' Perl script in 1994, he may even have
suggested putting it as a cron job.  I'll have to see if I can find
that.

But I am sure there were free FTP mirror programs published on Usenet
and/or well-known servers by the time MSFT filed.  I think that Claim
1 should be relatively easy to invalidate, if you had the legal
muscle.

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