Steve Block wrote:
That's ridiculous. A patent on that! Makes no sense. And why should I care? I would implement thousands of webmails with that functionallity, and that's it, they couldn't fight against that. Duroty already have this functionallity, they say Duroty is the OpenSource Gmail, and they even have a Google-group. No, I don't care patents, I make the software Free.
I haven't looked to see if there is a patent, but your blustering is not really useful if there is. And a patent on that idea would make sense. Before GMail I had never seen conversation threading in that form. It probably meets all of the patent requirements.
That said, it would be a nice feature. But like with any other project it pays to be careful.
well, google, as purveyor of all this is known, may give us the opportunity to find out with their new patent searching model. first hit? microsoft...
http://www.google.com/patents?q=email+conversation&btnG=Search+Patents
i think it would be a nice option, but should go on the wishlist rather than the core development list. it seems that it's secondary to a lot of the other core functionalities that need to be cleaned up and finished.
IMHO of course. ;-)
randy