Classic Apple hoarding software patents. Even if they don't use them, this looks like a threat move. Patenting programming language features is just sick.
Questions in that thread:
> 1. If a separate open-source programming language under Apache 2.0 license implements an optional chaining feature, would it be a violation of the patent then?
> 2. What if there's a separate implementation of a Swift compiler developed from scratch independently from Apple, does mean that it's not able to implement optional chaining without licensing the patent?
> 3. Here's the most interesting part: let's say there's a fork of a Swift compiler that significantly diverged and is developed independently from Apple. It seems to me that forks like these still don't violate the patent, otherwise any GitHub fork with unmerged PRs would be a violation. But let's say Google's fork no longer wishes to contribute its changes upstream, at what point does this separate development could trigger a patent violation? Does amount of divergence have any impact, let's say 90% of the codebase changes? Does the name of project matter, if someone names their fork as "Sparrow", not "Swift" is it considered a patent violation at this point if there's no license and royalties paid for optional chaining?
Patent law that allows software patents is already seriously messed up and urgently needs fixing. When it allows patenting programming languages, it's outright sick.
They are special enough to cause serious harm to progress if patented. This was demonstrated many times. Since the whole point of patents is to promote progress, software patents should not exist.
From what we see, software patents have caused more harm than good, but would be great if there were enough concrete public examples listed somewhere that prove otherwise.
Questions in that thread:
> 1. If a separate open-source programming language under Apache 2.0 license implements an optional chaining feature, would it be a violation of the patent then?
> 2. What if there's a separate implementation of a Swift compiler developed from scratch independently from Apple, does mean that it's not able to implement optional chaining without licensing the patent?
> 3. Here's the most interesting part: let's say there's a fork of a Swift compiler that significantly diverged and is developed independently from Apple. It seems to me that forks like these still don't violate the patent, otherwise any GitHub fork with unmerged PRs would be a violation. But let's say Google's fork no longer wishes to contribute its changes upstream, at what point does this separate development could trigger a patent violation? Does amount of divergence have any impact, let's say 90% of the codebase changes? Does the name of project matter, if someone names their fork as "Sparrow", not "Swift" is it considered a patent violation at this point if there's no license and royalties paid for optional chaining?