"I think the author of the algorithm implementation would have benefited more from..."
Well obviously the meta argument, taking a step back, is if the community insists on porting to ruby, doing all the work for him, such that the happy and cooperative leader can now collect sweet support contracts from MORE corporate users and increase the resume fodder value of his original product...
What looks better on dude's resume:
Author of a Java library with 1000 users resulting in $50K/yr support contract revenue
or
Author of a multiplatform Java and Ruby library with 2000 users resulting in $100K/yr support contract revenue
or
Author of a Java library, got into a fight with the ruby community mostly because I don't know the difference between licenses, copyrights, and patents, and now I've only got 500 users and $25K/yr of revenue
Certainly looks like it, or at least closely related. Can someone who is not served a localized copy of Google see if it is in fact a patent? (I see "status: application", loosely translated, but that's not something I can check the juridical meaning of.)
If you are able to view this, it is a "United States Patent Application Publication" that is found by following the `view pdf` button on the above link:
USPTO's PAIR website indicates that the application was rejected for non-patentability. I'd link it but PAIR doesn't do permanent links. Go to the main page at [1] and type in the application or publication number.
Hardly. Alice v CLS only throws out claims based on "performed on a general purpose computer". Mostly, that is enough to refute the remainder of the claims, as they apply to generic mathematical algorithms.
Systems such as this, however, have enjoyed patent protection in the past (Soundex, notably), and his own metaphone and double metaphone systems are cited in several other patents. Google patent search is your friend here.
Snarky comment: The USPTO has a habit of not denying any applications.
