Patent reads a little different then the comments here are suggesting. He's not patenting bitfields, he is patenting a method of making bitfields perform the same way across compilers. He even uses the term bitfield to describe his invention. Article title is misleading.
Here, here. It's misleading titles like these that make me not trust Hacker News when a big story breaks. E.g., when I saw through HN that the Dow Jones dropped by 1,000 points, I immediately corroborated with a few other sources, before reading on.
I don't know if its intentionally misleading or just that the majority of people don't know how to read the patent. If you actually look at the claims, the claims include the word bitfield. As a hint to would be patent evaluators, the only part of this document that means anything legally is the claims section. Thats where you can find out what is being legally protected. This patent actually has a lot of good supporting documentation as to why his method is an improvement. You can hate patents, thats OK. Its just important to get that hatred focused on the right target.
Comments
Patent reads a little different then the comments here are suggesting. He's not patenting bitfields, he is patenting a method of making bitfields perform the same way across compilers. He even uses the term bitfield to describe his invention. Article title is misleading.
Here, here. It's misleading titles like these that make me not trust Hacker News when a big story breaks. E.g., when I saw through HN that the Dow Jones dropped by 1,000 points, I immediately corroborated with a few other sources, before reading on.
I don't know if its intentionally misleading or just that the majority of people don't know how to read the patent. If you actually look at the claims, the claims include the word bitfield. As a hint to would be patent evaluators, the only part of this document that means anything legally is the claims section. Thats where you can find out what is being legally protected. This patent actually has a lot of good supporting documentation as to why his method is an improvement. You can hate patents, thats OK. Its just important to get that hatred focused on the right target.