Microsoft to patent ‘IsNot’
Posted on February 22, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 269 views |
WTF?
According to the patent application—filed in mid-November by Paul Vick, lead architect for Visual Basic .Net at Microsoft; Amanda Silver, a program manager on the Visual Basic team; and an individual in Bellevue, Wash., named Costica Barsan—the IsNot operator is described as a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two point to the same location in memory.
Geoff Perlman, CEO of Real Software, said the “is not” concept has existed for years in many computer languages, but Microsoft’s patent appears to cover only BASIC-like languages.
“We object to this patent,” Perlman said. “It fails the ‘obvious’ test, and there is clearly prior art in the industry.”
The idea that an operator can be patented is patently absurd, especially given that this concept, despite what the article says above appears to be “compares two variables to to determine if the two don’t point to the same location in memory”, has been around in computer science since damned near the beginning of time.
Operators could be considered the fundamental building blocks of programming languages, the atomic bits that make up all the bytes. To allow the patenting of operators is just senseless.
In other news: I’ve filed a patent for the WhatIf statement. Details to follow.
Update: Paul Vicks weighs in on this with his personal (ie: not as a Microsoft employee) perspective:
As far as the specific IsNot patent goes, I will say that at a personal level, I do not feel particularly proud of my involvement in the patent process in this case. Beyond that, there’s not much to say: many comments addressed legal questions which I am woefully unqualified to comment on and for which speculation would be very unwise on my part.