Just received the note below from Dr. Pearson. This puts things in better perspective for me: > > Sencel has applied for a patent for the general method described > by Rognes and Seeberg (2000) Bioinformatics 16:699. > > Unfortunately, we did not know that when we re-implemented their > algorithm for Altivec. I do not know whether they have received the > patent, but, since they warned us, if they do get the patent, the > University might be liable for infringement. > > So I no longer distribute the code. The last version of the Altivec > distribution was fasta34t22b4.shar.Z. > > We are currently working (rather slowly) on an alternate vector > solution that does not violate their patent. It's really pretty > simple, but I don't have a person in my lab right now who speaks > Altivec and has time to implement the alternative approach. > -C