I was reading this site about Multilingual User Interface and the Patent, then was wondering how does it differ to Amiga Locales?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_User_Interface

http://www.wikipatents.com/US-Patent-6252589/multilingual-user-interface-for-an-operating-system

It differs substantially. Firstly, Amiga systems have no concept of "resource" as it is known in Windows. This patented stuff is much more (unnecessarily) complicated compared to Amiga locale and uses some sort of dynamic linking to choose resources. Locale.library works 100% runtime and just returns strings of system (or selected) base language by identifiers passed as a parameter to GetCatalogStr() call. Theoretical limitation of Amiga locale is the fact that it only handles texts, while the patented system can handle also other resources, for example images. On the other hand it can be easily worked around, and Amiga system has the advantage of simplicity, ease of use and flexibility.

[ Edited by Krashan on 2010/9/21 7:57 ]

"resource" would need to be defined, I believe all libraries are resources, and also are the language files. you can encode images within text right? so theoretically without change (although not necessarily elegant) amiga locals can handle images too for example.

Quote:

A simple path to an image in the catalog should be enough to 'localise' picture.

"resource" would need to be defined

The term "resource" is pretty well defined in context of Microsoft Windows programming. Resources are embedded into executable file usually.

I pretty much doubt that patent is valid. There's too many prior art for them to be able to win in court with it against anyone.