Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:27:30PM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
> 
> If you have done your own research then the algorithms wouldn't
> necessarily be the same- they'd nearly certainly be different, wouldn't
> they? So isn't that the basis for the patent? A patent is a registration
> of an idea. Two different ideas can still arrive at the same conclusion.

Patents are often about methods, not algorithms.  In fact, there's
supposedly a restriction against algorithms being patented -- though of
course lawmakers and people working at the patent office don't seem to
know what an algorithm is, so algorithms do get patented all the time.

Anyway . . . as it happens, patenting a "method" provides far more broad
power than patenting an algorithm, anyway, in practice.  That's one of
the reason (software) patents are so damaging.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Reginald Braithwaite: "Nor is it as easy as piling more features
on regardless of how well they fit or whether people will actually use
them. Otherwise Windows would have 97% of the market and OS X 3%. (Oh
wait.)"
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