[time-nuts] HP 5335A and HP-IB (GP-IB)

Chuck Harris cfharris at erols.com
Mon Aug 2 13:16:25 UTC 2010


When I read your note, I was sure that you had to be joking.... but you are
not generally a joking person when it comes to technical stuff.  So I read
the patent, and I was sure that it must be April Fools Day... Nope, it's
August.... Well, some kind of fools are involved here...

Basically what this patent is saying is that if you give the controller
the address of the function that called it, and tell the controller to
call back the function when it is ready, and your controller is GPIB,
you owe NI royalties.

You have got to be joking!

Time to go and put in some more words in favor of Bilsky.

-Chuck Harris

John Miles wrote:
>
>> You can't copyright an instruction set.  Any patent protection NI may
>> have had would have expired long ago.
>
> Any sane person would think so.
>
>> There is nothing preventing anyone
>> that is willing to go to the development effort from making a NI
>> clone, and
>> several companies existed doing just that.
>
> http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5974541/description.html
>
> Here, the USPTO has seen fit to grant National Instruments ownership of the
> general concept of a C callback function, when it happens to be used in a
> GPIB interface layer.  If you're in the GPIB hardware business, you cannot
> release an API for your hardware that supports the ibnotify() function
> without licensing this patent.  Needless to say, LabVIEW requires
> ibnotify().
>




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