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Looking at Eolas, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to see the degree to which Eolas is beating Microsoft in Court, and the ridiculous hoops that Microsoft has jumped though in the process (Microsoft attempt to claim inventorship of Eolas invention-pdf). But on the other hand Eolas patent is sort of the worst kind of patent-squatting - thinking of something, patenting it, and then hoping others will pay you to license it, because you don't plan on developing it.

If you look at Eolas's website you don't get the impression that they're generating too many "algorithms that implement dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications," to quote Cringely. Granted they developed the first plugin - in 1993! - for Mosaic! but they don't seem to be doing much else these days, in the hey day of the interactive internet. In fact, as near as I can figure they don't generate anything except law suits (right now only against MS, but what's to stop them from going after Netscape, Mozilla, Sun, etc. should they decide to do so.)

You really have to wonder about how far this sort of thing will be taken in the future - that is how many people will patent ideas and not act on them until that fundamental idea has made many companies tremendously successful. After all what if Turing had pattened the idea of "stored information, which can be utilized to control an electronic machine in the preformance of actions determined by the information" - the stored program executable. Morris and Eckert would have had to pay him to write the code for the ENIAC and we'd be paying his heirs everytime we wrote an executable (assuming his heirs renewed the patent).

Another reason for excluding Java from Windows XP wasn't mentioned by Cringley but was hinted at by Prasad. It would seem that Eolas's successes against Microsoft in court pose the threat of competition to .NET in the form of a Java-based open-source distributed application environment.

This was the first time I'd heard of the Eolas patent. Sounds like another company that's looking to get rich off of patents instead of, you know, creating any sort of useful product. (If you go to their web site, it seems to be little more than information about their lawsuit.) If I were Microsoft, I'd probably do the same thing, just to piss them off. But I'm petty and vindictive that way.