Re: Tux 2 patents

[Jeff V. Merkey]

Forward the document to [e-mail].  Regarding patents, for
prior art to be valid it has to have been "reduced to practice" (the
legal term).  That means it has to have been implemented and the theory
demonstrated.  There's no real requirement under US Patent Law that it
be shipped, turned into code, etc., but in order to qualify as "prior
art" is has to have been shown to have been "reduced to practice" in
some meaningful way, and isn't hot air.  If your document meets these
requirements, it will count towards this issue ...

Jeff

"Jeff V. Merkey" wrote:
> 
> The patent attorneys at Malinkrodt received the materials Daniel sent
> yesterday on the Tux 2 patents via courier and are working on the
> analysis.  They said they would have something for us to post on LKML
> next week.
> 
> Jeff
> 
> Alain Williams wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I remember when at the University of Cambridge (in England) about 25 years ago
> > seeing some work then about the Jackdaw (or was is Jackard) database system
> > that had the great feature of being immune to OS crashes, it used a phased
> > update mechanism where new blocks were written to disk and the last block
> > written was the one that contained the switched pointer, until this last block
> > had been written the changes had not been made. Since the write of a disk block
> > was atomic the database would never be corrupt.
> >
> > If someone wants I think that I still have a (paper) copy of the report describing
> > this. I can send/fax a copy if wanted.
> >
> > I don't subscribe to this list, so please reply direct if someone wants it.
> >
> > (Please don't request a copy just out of curiosity since I don't want to have
> > to post/fax copies that won't help resolve this case by showing prior art.)
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > --
> > Alain Williams
> > -
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> > the body of a message to [e-mail]
> > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/