[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/6/1 Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
>> 2009/5/31 Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:
>> > The idea of showing diffs since the user last viewed the same
>> > wave, is very similar to Flagged revisions.
>>
>> How is it in any way like Flagged revisions?
>
> From the video, the user interface color marked the differences in
> the wave since I last looked at it.  I thought of this as the diff
> since the last flagged (approved) version.  It's a collaboratively
> edited document with a linear version history (like RCS or wiki),
> but with bookmarks (flags) for certain previous versions.
>
> I didn't say it's an equivalent, but some ideas are familiar.

I suppose. The key thing with Flagged Revisions, though, is that one
person flags a revision for everyone. Just having a flag on the last
revision you saw isn't really the same thing. It would probably
require a whole new database table to implement, as well. FlaggedRevs
just requires an extra column in an existing table (MediaWiki's
implementation may have more than that, but the basic concept doesn't
require it).

> The mention of a "patent license" should make us worried.  Does
> Google, for example, have a patent on the animated playback?
> Should we need a patent for "flagged revisions" to counter that?

We have no intention of defending such a patent, so there is no point
taking one out. It would still qualify as prior art without having
been patented, wouldn't it? Hopefully any relevant patents they do
take out will be released under some kind of free license (I'm not
sure what the point of patenting it would be, in that case, though).