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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

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Thursday, February 19, 2004

epoline-OLF Software is a Delphi Project tied to Microsoft Windows Platforms.

In my

earlier posting I had reported about the

open source approach taken by the

EPO with regard to their

epoline OLF software. Yesterday I talked to a software engineer who had inspected the source code more in detail. In fact, the software is written in a special flavour of

Pascal, namely

Delphi brought to market by

Borland. Interestingly, there is also a Linux-compatible variant of Delphi available called

Kylix. But the option to port the epoline software to Linux is effectively blocked by an immense number of calls to Microsoft-specific APIs in the epoline OLF code.

The

PatTrAS software issued by the

German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) has been coded in a much more compatible and platform-independent way. It is written in Java and seems to run quite well on a Linux computer having a Java Runtime Environment installed.

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