Can Lotus Notes R3 Prior Art Save The Browser? 522
theodp writes "Apparently stunned by the implications of Eolas vs Microsoft, Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove fame offers up Notes R3 as prior art for the notorious Eolas patent. To bolster his argument, Ozzie used the Notes R3 feature set to recreate a scenario close to what was described in the patent. After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay, it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel."
Re:Hmmmm, this could be good for microsoft. (Score:4, Insightful)
We should be grateful that this protects other browsers - because that's who Eolas will be after next.
Stemmo
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Such a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind, that if Microsoft is screwed over with abuse of a patent, you might be next.
Same thing with the abuse of any right or law. Keep in mind when the law is abused or a right trampled on, even for a good cause, the next time it may not be a good cause or it could be you that is being abused.
This will expose the danger of software patents... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't do it oz man (Score:3, Insightful)
Its all BS anyway. (Score:3, Insightful)
Legal battles, and taking the high road (Score:1, Insightful)
1. The patent is outrageous, and demonstrate with a "GO MICROSOFT"
or should we wait until MS gives us a hint by replacing its index page with "in protest against software patents"?
not very good "prior art" (Score:1, Insightful)
I strongly dislike software patents (I dislike patents, period), but that's no excuse to be sloppy in attacking one.
Good news, good thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Eolas could easily proceed to sue the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, and anyone else who writes a browser with plugin technologies. That would be devastating for developers, users, and web designers. The News.com article [com.com] linked in one of the previous articles on this topic points out that not only would the browser have to be revised, but far too many web pages as well.
Would I like to see Microsoft set back a bit, or at least forced to mess with IE some? Yeah. But this is a case that would affect all of us negatively, not just Microsoft. We owe Ray Ozzie some thanks for bringing this to light.
Mark Erikson
I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash. That's not the way we should be going. Accessibility, backwards compatability, and speed, are all important issues. Demanding people use Flash doesn't help with that. Slashdot recently linked to a hardware site that used Flash for its benchmark graphs.. no animation there, just blatantly unnecessary use of Flash.
Plugins encourage people to just throw plugins into their old crappy non-standards compliant browser rather than get a new one. There are people using Netscape 4 with Flash who are still perfectly happy.. they're like the elderly drivers in their 30 year old 'danger on the road' Chevys.
Plugins are like offering 'plugin upgrades' for cars. When your car gets slow, plug in a 'turbo' upgrade.. sure, it makes the car fast again, but your engine was busted up anyway, and you should just get a new one.
Without plugins we can rely on more integral browser support for proper standards like SVG, CSS, and the DOM.
You might argue that Flash is an open standard, but it's not. Macromedia updates it at such a fast pace that new features and methods are thrown in every few months. And, worse, Macromedia's Flash plugins and player take over 99.9% of the Flash playing marketplace.. meaning you're forced to follow their standard.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
This may help OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
As a result, MS may still have to pay the $500M, but Mozilla et al may be spared from similar judgement. Sadly this could go to court and could be expensive if Eolas wants to pursue it with others... has anyone from the OSS browser community contacted Eolas? As others have suggested, they might be amenable to licensing it to that community and then a court proceeding might be avoidable altogether.
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you have questions about this, please email me at tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
Re:Nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
How? The suit said that a browser that allowed you to open a page that needed a helper program to render/show content was not possible without licensing the patent. That means any plugins would be not allowed. Ok, that stops a couple of security holes, at least somewhat, but it means Java, Flash, QuickTime, etc. are no longer available.
MS could do two things once they accept the patent as valid: they could strip out all possibility of plugins for IE, or they could license the patent. As a quick guess, I'd say the latter would be easier. (And would put projects such as Mozilla is a bind, since they are not likely to be able to raise the money to pay for a license.)
(Quick conspirisary theory: If you assume MS could have come up with prior art, they might 'agree' to loose, if it meant they would have 'minor' license fees but there would be no other licenses, thereby driving out all their competition. Slightly over-paranoid, but it is MS...)
Re:not very good "prior art" (Score:3, Insightful)
Hope it works (Score:5, Insightful)
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm, this could be good for microsoft. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ray Ozzie's a bright man. He might be a bit too much into bed with Microsoft for my tastes, but he can see how Eolas getting its way here is a B-A-D thing. It'd be like someone holding a patent on HTML.
Re:not very good "prior art" (Score:5, Insightful)
He did the equivalent of writing a web page that required a plug in and showing that it worked. You would have to do the same with IE to prove it infringed the patent.
Re:Trial is over (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Such a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like the way they do their business.
Microsoft may have done a lot of bad things, but this patent applies to every browser out there. They are fighting, trying to find a way. It is a better idea to support this fight.
Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoops.
Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless your name is "Bill Gates", the chances of
"us" doing this is about zero. The "other" browsers have virtually no impact any more. Game over. Whatever "standards" that a 3rd party came up with are completely irrelevant. I've argued that they've been irrelevant for several years now, in fact. Whatever IE does is the de-facto standard, no matter what the
Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, you could create a plugin for IE that fully supports PNG, or MNG. It's absolutely ridiculous that every single function of a browser should have to be statically compiled into it.
Sure, flash is completely evil, and I wouldn't miss java one bit, but that doesn't mean plugins are all bad, and it certainly doesn't mean the very idea of plugins should be outlawed.
Besides, make plugins illegial, and you'll only see Flash become a built-in browser feature, instead of a plugin.
Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what's really sad... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm, this could be good for microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not for Microsoft or Eolas, nor am I against them in this case.
What I resent is this whole sordid litigious mess, the colossal waste of effort and money to get these cases sorted, and lawyers getting richer over a silly issue.
Re:Hope it works (Score:2, Insightful)
US patent law actually favors those that hold patents and don't sell software. All they have to do is to apply for the patent and sue the first one the market the application. If they don't sell anything they can't be countersued because they won't infringe on any defensive patent.
Software vendors have assets that can be seized. Their sales can be invoked in court as "proof" the patent has value and can be used as a basis to calculate the "damages". Lawsuit companies that are just empty shells for lawyers and lawsuits have no such weaknesses.
If this business model is allowed to succeed, venture capitalists will eventually see how the game is rigged. They may stop investing in software vendors but they may start to see patent shell companies like some good risk capital.the whole software industry will stop.
The ironic thing is this bullshit may help some open source projects to prosper if software companies sees open source as a way to shift some liability to the hackers! That is assuming hackers are not afraid to be sued themselves and keep hacking.
Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they would be built directly into the browser (DOM and CSS2 already are). That's the advantage of open standards.
Re:Wrong (think PDF) (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
Re:Don't do it oz man (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation may well be like the electronics industry in the 1950s and 1960s -- a few large corporations with extensive circuit patent portfolios built all the electronic devices, and avoided patent lawsuits by cross-licensing the portfolios back and forth. But little guys without a portfolio were effectively locked out. They couldn't afford to license the patented circuits they needed individually.
If this becomes the established practice, Microsoft and IBM and Sun and a few other companies will be able to write software "legally", but no one else will. I believe that RMS has written repeatedly that software patents have the potential to destroy the open-source software community.
Think about what you're saying (Score:5, Insightful)
Taken in another context, it's a bit like saying
If we dismiss the travesty that Eolas is trying to get away with because the victims are Microsoft and plug-ins, don't come bitching to me when you get sued off your ass for using a JPEG or GIF on your website.
Re:This may NOT save the browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Replying to self... almost forgot... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's the law firm who wants to tackle Microsoft more than Doyle. Food for thought?
^_^
:I don't agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft can use LOSING to their advantage here. (Score:3, Insightful)
You see, if they lose, they can actually turn this to their advantage. As others have observed, Microsoft can afford to pay licensing fees. Most developers of other browsers can't. Thus, if Microsoft were to lose or "settle," they'd simply be creating another barrier to entry in the browser market. Which is remarkably good for them in a time when their current browser is at a developmental dead end.
Re:Wrong (think PDF) (Score:5, Insightful)
But why do you need plugins for that? I have my browsers configured to launch xpdf for pdf files (I could do the same thing with acroread, but I like xpdf better, and I have fewer problems printing with it). And conversely I have xpdf setup to launch a browser window when I click a link. I don't see why a plugin is necessary.
Re:Wrong (think PDF) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BEFORE YOU REPLY TO ANOTHER EOLAS ARTICLE... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. To HIS requirements. This is no better than Microsoft driving the market. This is supposed to be a FREE market, folks. That means the CONSUMER drives it, not the suppliers. Even if we all agree that supplier A driving the market is totally evil, the solution is not to have supplier B pop up and take their place.
Then what if he doesn't like something Moz does? Perhaps he's in bed with a spammer, who is losing cash because of the popup blocking. Does the standard specify popup blocking? If not then Moz isn't strictly following the standards.
"This guy isn't the bad guy."
No, this guy is ANOTHER bad guy. He doesn't like the way MS is driving the market, and wants to drive it himself. The problem is not which supplier is driving the market, it's that the market is being driven by a supplier in the first place.
"Lotus is dead"
Yeah, but it wasn't some years ago, when this patent was applied for. That's the whole point of the article, if I read it correctly. If Lotus could do it back then, then the patent is rubbish.
PDF sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
And what, pray tell, PDF plugins exsist for MSIE apart from Adobes junk?
(Note to adobe: I don't agree with your licensen junk! I just click the button to read some stuff in that format!)
Re:Wrong (think PDF) (Score:3, Insightful)
Good typesetting. not crap like the html rendering
Mathematic formulas: Mathml isnt there yet, and looks crappy. People like to identify indeces without selecting bigger font sizes.
Vector charts: ditto for svg. not hear yet.
Also i can save a pdf on disk or print it. Try this with a web page. You may get dozens of gifs/jpegs/stuff, then there is a stylesheet missing, your other browser doesnt recognize the mathml, the font sizes are different and the ".gif" formulas dont match the rest of the text...
I wonder what problems everybody has with the page nature of pdf. I actually read a lot more text in books than on screen, and imho there is nothing wrong with defining a fixed lines per page relation or using the unit "page" to divide a bigger document in manageble portions.
Re:Nuts (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there is the third choice: just buy Eolas. I'm fairly sure MS has the cash, if it wants it.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Your argument sounds like sour grapes. Does it upset you that the web is no longer solely the domain of academics and nerds? You may not like Flash (it doesn't bother me all that much), but it is easy to use and easy to create new content with.
So perhaps your argument is that Flash usage is denied for the Linux platform. That's Macromedia's choice - if it was a public utility then perhaps it would be different, but Macromedia has chosen, either wilfully, or more likely perhaps ignorance, to not market to Linux users. It is their CHOICE. Frankly, I don't blame them - it is a little difficult to run down the numbers on exactly how many people use Linux as a desktop (not as a server) and how many of those people are actually interested in accessing multimedia content.
As for SVG - it's a case of "too little, too late". Sure, it's a standard, but it's a standard that didn't mature (if it's mature) until after the introduction of Flash content. So, by the process of technical Darwinism, SVG loses, which is correct. The tech/business world lives and dies by the maxim "You snooze, you lose".
SVG, CSS, and DOM cannot settle all the issues out there with informational layout (nor can Flash, I freely admit that), rather they are simply another tool to use, besides Flash and other less-popular plugins.
I hope this prior art silences Eolas... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have the Flash plugin installed in Linux and Windows. It's NO INCONVENIENCE AT ALL to download a file less than 700 KB in size and install it.
Of course there are places where Flash usage is excessive or relied on too much, but there are many places where it is appropriate.
As a web developer, I know how hard it is to mimick the interactivty and animation. Flash is a mature product, it has many features that are impossible/very difficult to implement using XHTML/DOM/CSS/JavaScript/SVG/DHTML/etc.
When I develop a web page where I am given Flash to embed, I also provide a plain text alternative - and I make a point of making it looking as simple/boring as possible. That way visually impaired visitors can still use the site, and those "Flash is evil" users can be punished with very un-appealing presentation. I mean these technologies have been around for years - designed to enrich our browsing experience. Why not accept it and get on with life?
Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in Flash. Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in W3C technologies. Flash vector animations are very small - higher quality and much smaller than the equivalent animated gif or DHTML.
The Flash plugin is quite cross browser/operating system friendly. Imagine the headaches accomplishing the same interactivty/animation using W3C code. Browsers don't adhere to standards perfectly.
Some tech users may find plugins evil or inconvenient - why? Think of the 100 times more people who aren't techies - think how they appreciate the simplicity of plugins. Just one or two "OK" clicks if they don't have the plugin - and they are viewing the plugin content.
The internet is a heterogenous store of many different forms of media - user friendly browsing is achieved by browsers capable of displaying multiple media formats IN THE BROWSER. This includes PDF, Flash and M$ Office files. The general internet population is not as savvy as many of us on
Mike
kill two two bad things (Score:3, Insightful)
- No more plugins in any browser - I would enjoy whole Internet using only official and open web stabdards;
- No more software patents - no comments on that as such befits are two obvious for all normal people;
But I'm afraid that IBM will come up right at the last moment with something from their huge patent library and say:Re:Such a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and no. Mozilla can easily get by without plug ins because of XUL.
Even Prior-er art (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but I sure as hell would never use something, knowing that I could be sued at any time for using it...
Maybe Netscape will become profitable again, and they feel like making some money off of AOL?
I'm at a loss to figure out how this could make things better.