On Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:33:24 BST, John Bradford said:

> What if a patent is discovered which is owned by somebody other than
> Larry, which covers something in BK?  If nobody is allowed to use BK,
> how would we get the data out?

And more importantly, what would you put the data back *INTO*?

There's no guarantee that said patent doesn't also screw over all CVS users,
or SCCS, or what have you.

Also, there's a *very* good chance that any patent that hits BK would *also*
afflict a BK clone, unless they were lucky enough to use a totally different
algorithm to achieve the same on-the-wire result.  And if the patent is against
the *idea* of doing XYZ with a computer, then the algorithm won't matter anyhow.