Re: Open hardware wireless cards

From: Bernd Petrovitsch
Date: Sun Jan 09 2005 - 17:31:00 EST


On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 10:59 +0100, Norbert van Nobelen wrote:
> On Saturday 08 January 2005 21:47, you wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:09:29PM +0100, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 03:14:34PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
[...]
> > > > Being open doesn't mean you aren't violating some stupid patent.
> > >
> > > Only in some countries. We can ignore those countries.

Hardly. (Almost) all of the western world is included (and probably most
of the rest).

> > Patents on hardware are legal and common in _many_ countries including
> > all countries in the EU.

In general yes.

> There are several independent designs in the market for these chipsets, but as
> far as I know the patents only govern the complete chipset, thus the contents
> of the chipset is not to be worried about.
> The other patent issue is the 802.11 standard itself. Is that patent free?
> (IE: That would be a stupid patent)

You know how many "stupid" patents out there?
An yes, they are granted and they (actually their holders) wait until
they are legal.

Bernd
--
Firmix Software GmbH http://www.firmix.at/
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