[PeerToPatent Australia] Invitation

[Torbjorn Granlund]

PeerToPatent Australia Team <no-reply at peertopatent.org.au> writes:

  Hewlett Packard has filed a patent application titled "Binary
  representation of number based on processor word size" which has very
  similar algorithm as used by GNU GMP since version 2.0.2.
  
If I understand what this means, GMP has used "the invention" since
version 1.1, the first public release.  Surely every bignum package
before GMP used "the invention".

  I think it would be great if developers of GMP are able to come in and
  show us the relevance directly in order to prevent the granting of
  low-quality patents.
  
What exactly would you like us to do?

Is this an Australian patent, or is it a US patent?

There are tens of thousands of truly silly software patents in the US.
Large corporation and patent trolls alike patent obvious ideas and
well-known ideas.  I think the Free Software developers shouldn't allow
themselves to get distracted by these corporate activities.  The
corporations have inexhaustible resources for patenting and re-patenting
ideas, and as long as our government collude, we might do best just to
ignore the entire spectacle.  But we should pressure governments into
stop accepting software patents.

In Europe we have a better situation since we have been able to thwart
the corporations every time they have tried to coerce the EU and the
governments into allowing software patents.  At least two of the GMP
developers have been quite active there, actually.

-- 
Torbjörn