Le 20/07/2010 16:09, Francisco José Tapia wrote:
I am writing you because today, looking for other think I discovered a US patent “Positional access using a B-tree” ( US patent Number 7,120,637B2 Oct, 10, 2006), and I don't know if this patent prevent the publication of the code in your library, because you can consider the red-black trees an simplification of B-trees If prevent, and you don't have an idea about the utility of the code, I will stop the develop, and I will spend my time with new ideas
The idea about the counter trees you can find in “The art of computer Programming “ Donald Knuth, and I have a previous version of this code wrote 10 years ago and presented in my exposition in the Oposiciones a Catedrático de Informática ( Madrid 2001)
Patents become invalid if you can demonstrate prior art. I wouldn't worry too much about it in this case.