isearch, LEAP and patents was: Re: Could Emacs be rewritten in Python?

[Alexander Schmolck]

[crossposted to comp.emacs; followups set]

[THE and LEAP(tm) [sic!] (http://humane.sourceforge.net/home/) seem rather
similar to emacs and isearch]

"Neil Hodgson" <nhodgson at bigpond.net.au> writes:

> Alexander Schmolck:
> 
> > He certainly knows about Emacs (have a look at the index of his book), but
> I
> > guess obtaining patents and attracting attention as some sort of visionary
> is
> > unnecessarily complicated by pointing out the prior art yourself. And
> although
> > the most crucial (and brilliant) idea, incremental search, is nicked (and
> > uncredited on his webpage),
> 
>    Priority for incremental search is uncertain - Jef Raskin has been
> pushing LEAP since at least the mid 80s with the Swyftcard and Canon Cat
> products. The earliest publication reference found in a quick google is
> November 1985. When did EMACS get incremental search?
> http://archaic-apples.shauny.de/files/cat/canon.html
> 
>    Neil

Emacs has been around since the late 70ies and the last time I looked around
on the web I came to the conclusion that swyftcard and canon cat came into
existence at a time when emacs already had incremental search. Given that I'm
not positively certain, however, I should have phrased this more carefully.

Maybe someone on comp.emacs can fill us in on isearch's origins and whether
raskin holds any patents that are relevant to emacs (he certainly seems to
either hold or have applied for patents concerning THE[1] and from what I gather
from his webpage pretty much everything that would seem original enough to get
patented is present in emacs)?

[1] Raskin holds a number of patents and has several relating to UIs pending.

 the legalese for THE states: 

 "Distribution of this in-progress software is for testing and illustrative
 purposes only and does not confer any rights, including rights to reproduce
 copyrighted material and patented inventions."

 (BTW, any idea why this clearly not open source project is hosted by SF?)

alex