On Sat, Jan 26, 2019, at 20:29, Michael Verrenkamp wrote:

Howdy folks,

Just a heads up to those who follow the progress of various development technologies. Apple appeared to be doing something really good for the world when they decided the make their Swift programming language open to the world to be used as people wished.

Apparently they could help themselves and have decided to start patenting various functions of the language.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9952841B2/en

Thanks, Michael, for that. I haven't read through the entirety of the claims, but all I've looked at seems to be just common practice. Whatever you might think about software patents (ha ha), this sort of thing happens appallingly often: Company makes (bogus) patent claim for something that's already standard practice, and it wrongly gets passed by the patent examiners. Once they have the patent they can use it to beat up anyone who's just using well-known techniques, and that can be challenged only by someone with enough dollars to challenge the validity of the the patent in court. I saw this happen a few years ago with Blackboard company, who revealed they had a sleeper patent on any sort of online learning-management system. In this case, in the face of massive protest by academics, they backed down from enforcing their patent, but legally their patent still stands. All up, this is another thing wrong with the current "intellectual property" regime. — Smiles, Les.