🚀 go-pugleaf

With all the recent noise on this group about laughable patents granted
by the US Patent Office for various commonplace software ideas, I think
we should remember that some of the patents they have granted have been
for truly original and even exciting inventions.

Personally, I consider the UNIX set uid bit (Patent 4,135,240) to be an
invention of fundamental importance.  This invention is perhaps the
simplest solution to the mutual distrust problem anyone has found.
(Recall that this problem was unsolved on MULTICS and recall that
other solutions to this problem involve things like capability based
addressing that are uncommon on most commercially available hardware,
with the exception of the IBM AS 400 and a few less successful systems).

The patents on data compression algorithms (4,464,650 4,558,302
4,814,746 4,797,729), on sorting algorithms (3,380,029), and on
cryptographic methods (4,200,770 4,218,582 4,405,829 4,424,414)
also appear to be cover genuine inventions, although I'm not familiar
with the details, and I understand that the LZW family of compression
algorithms are covered by conflicting or overlapping patents.

There are two directions that the Patent Office could move.  One
direction would involve abandoning software patents, either because
they can't get staff who can tell the difference between good patents
and bad, or because they determine that even if the silly software
patents can be eliminated, software patents would be detremental to
the advance of our art.

The second direction would be to shore up the patent office staff with
a corps of experienced programmers, or at least programmers with
advanced degrees to assure that they have people who really understand
the state of the art.  They may also need to require some software
training on the part of lawyers who want to practice software patent law.
This might work to cure their habit of granting embarrassing patents.