sep 30
since the us supreme court has upheld eolas' patent on embedded web apps, do you think this will cause a lot of problems to java-based applications in addition to microsoft's .net applications? i havent followed this thing carefully but it looks like it's too broad a patent in general. any opinions?
2 comments:
The business of patenting is in a way a big game, as I have had the opprotunity to review many "granted" applications. So many from so many big corporations are so broad that one would think that this is merely to brow beat emerging upstarts based on sheer financial and legal muscle.
Also these patenting processes are not fool proof -- even granted patents can be contested against and reviewed in light of the arguments as we are witness these days in biotech patents.
I searched for some web pages on eola patent and found this.
For once, I am seeing Microsoft being supported. The major criticism is that it is a very general patent, and covers almost all the web technologies in use today. This means, Microsoft has to redesign IE, which means time, effort and money, and it also means, a reworked untested version, riddled with vulnerabilities and bugs. More security patches, more updates and service packs. Hope it does not involve a major code change.
a comment on a page --
"The Eola patent case is, I think, yet another ridiculous example of bad patents. The concept here is that imbedding another program in a brower is the patentable idea, which is utterly ridiculous to any programmer."
another one --
"I’m not going to do any doom-and-gloom speculation on what this victory means, especially when the infringement case is being appealed to the Supreme Court; I’ll let you guys handle the speculation in the discussion thread. I’ll just wrap up by noting that the ‘906 patent appears to be vague enough to cover almost any program that’s embedded in a Web page and that talks bidirectionally with a server. That means not just Microsoft’s ActiveX, the technology that originally brought on the round of Eolas vs. Microsoft infringement lawsuits, but Flash, Java, and most of the other stuff that makes the Web interesting to use. So there’s no doubt that if the Eolas folks can take this fight all the way, they’ll be very, very rich. It remains to be seen, however, just how much headache they’ll cause for the rest of us as Microsoft and everyone else rushes to work around the patent"
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