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Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 18:26:00 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
cc: Daniel Phillips <phillips@arcor.de>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
       <frankeh@watson.ibm.com>, <davidm@hpl.hp.com>,
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       <Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com>, <wli@holomorpy.com>,
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Subject: Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)
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On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> This issue is more complicated than you might think.

No, it's not. You miss the point.

>					  Big companies with 
> big pockets are very nervous about being too closely associated with 
> Linux because of this problem. 

The point being that that is _their_ problem, and at a level that has 
nothing to do with technology.

I'm saying that technical people shouldn't care. I certainly don't. The 
people who _should_ care are patent attourneys etc, since they actually 
get paid for it, and can better judge the matter anyway.

Everybody in the whole software industry knows that any non-trivial
program (and probably most trivial programs too, for that matter) will
infringe on _some_ patent. Ask anybody. It's apparently an accepted fact,
or at least a saying that I've heard too many times. 

I just don't care. Clearly, if all significant programs infringe on 
something, the issue is no longer "do we infringe", but "is it an issue"?

And that's _exactly_ why technical people shouldn't care. The "is it an 
issue" is not something a technical guy can answer, since the answer 
depends on totally non-technical things.

Ask your legal counsel, and I strongly suspect that if he is any good, he
will tell you the same thing. Namely that it's _his_ problem, and that
your engineers should not waste their time trying to find existing
patents.

			Linus

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