[luriel]

It is funny that the Unix team at Bell Labs ended up realizing the setuid was not such a good idea after all, and replaced it with a much better design in Plan 9 (meanwhile this has been pretty much ignored back in *nix land, where many limitations, like the lack of usable private namespaces, and security issues are due to setuid):

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/auth

Somewhere there is a comment by Rob Pike (which I can't find now) about how it was ironic that the only thing patented in Unix early on turned out to be such a bad idea after all.

This historical notes aside, that we allow this software patent insanity to go on is scary and depressing. The billions of dollars being wasted (not to mention the amount of time and other precious resources) because of patents is staggering.