Re: Sun's interval patents Zenon, George, Vladik,

indeed the patents would interfere with most interval tools, and this has all
kinds of consequences. Unfortunately from our end, this situation has now led
to the fact that we are not allowed to talk to people involved in the patent
applications anymore to prevent any conceivable later claims of knowledge
transfer about material in the applications. This is of course similar to the
way that SUN isn't talking about it either, and it unfortunately seems to be
the way lawyers do want to handle such matters.

In fact, the funding agencies DOE and NSF are very worried about endangering
the approximately $5 Million that went into the development of our COSY tool
so far, because obviously several pieces of it would fall under the claims of
the patent applications. So the COSY project could conceivably be shut down or
at least attacked and hopelessly bogged down by an overzealous army of SUN
lawyers. How far-fetched is this worry? Who knows; I would have considered it
hopelessly far-fetched to think that anyone would want to apply for such
patents in the first place.

Just recently this had the very frustrating effect that we cannot interact
anymore with one of our past valued consultants who is involved on the fringe
of the patent issues. We also could not follow a request from the European
Space Agency to apply the COSY validated integrators to some of their solar
system orbit problems, since although ESA stated to me that they strongly
discourage such patent efforts, some of their potential contractors are
apparently involved in it.

What a pity it all is.

Martin Berz



