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From: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: New Macintosh Strategy
Message-ID: <77800053@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Nov 90 06:22:00 GMT
References: <306@cti1.UUCP>
Lines: 21
Nf-ID: #R:cti1.UUCP:306:m.cs.uiuc.edu:77800053:000:1051
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Nov  5 00:22:00 1990


(1) Patents are not issued for computer algorithms.  Only trade secret
and copyright protection is available for such algorithms (and
languages, like quickdraw, which is copyrighted).  I disbelieve that
any part of the Quickdraw code is patented in a way that would stand
up in court.

(2) I believe Pheonix Technologies legally cloned the IBM ROM BIOS as
follows.  First get two design teams together.  One reads the BIOS and
writes an exact behavioral specification of how the BIOS should work,
including the bugs it should have.  The second team contains no
programmer that has ever disassembled a single line of IBM BIOS.  In
complete isolation, they take the functional specification and write a
ROM BIOS from scratch.  This method has been upheld in court.  Pheonix
Technologies was careful to document the design process, and make sure
to get "virgin" programmers.


Don W. Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies