Re: rough first impressions

On Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 09:32 PM, Gregory T. Sullivan wrote:

> I'm familiar with Intentional Software's work and I'm quite certain
> that anything covered in the current thread is more than adequately
> covered by prior art.


That is simply your opinion, and not the law as it stands now. Whether  
one thinks Intentional Software either deserves, or doesn't deserve to  
have exclusive rights to these features, as a matter of law, they do.  
The rather expensive burden of proving otherwise would be on anyone who  
violated those patents. That which you see as prior art, might very  
well be ruled by the courts to be less specific previous work, which  
would avail you little, or not at all in a legal fight.

The features we've been discussing are summarized by this portion of  
one of the patent abstracts:

"The program tree editor receives commands from a user that are  
independent of a programming language syntax. The present invention  
also provides a display representation generator for generating a  
display representation of the program tree."

from  
<http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- 
Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch- 
bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F5790863>

"Independent of a programming language syntax," being the key part.

Raf

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
[email protected]