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Mailing lists / fpc-other / 2014-08

Borland's SEH patent has expired

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Sven Barth

Hello together!

I just read that Borland's SEH patent has expired on 15th June 2014. :) http://www.google.com/patents/US5628016
While I don't think that Borland would have gone after us (especially considering that it was Microsoft who first introduced the technique in their compilers) we now definitely don't need to "fear" any legal problems anymore regarding SEH on i386-win32. :)

Regards,
Sven

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Mark Morgan Lloyd
to Sven Barth
Sven Barth wrote 8 lines
Hello together! I just read that Borland's SEH patent has expired on 15th June 2014. :) http://www.google.com/patents/US5628016 While I don't think that Borland would have gone after us (especially considering that it was Microsoft who first introduced the technique in their compilers) we now definitely don't need to "fear" any legal problems anymore regarding SEH on i386-win32. :)

Assuming obviously that it would have been upheld if challenged. Even in 1994 there was a lot of de-facto open-source code, including the source of OSes and development tools from IBM (and others), and quite a lot of that must have described novel stack manipulation strategies.

Elsewhere, I notice that IBM have moved Watson (which famously won a quiz contest a couple of years ago) into "the cloud" where it is being usefully employed by e.g. cancer researchers. It would be interesting to see what it made of the US patents archive.

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]

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