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Geoworks Demands Royalties For All WAP Apps
Ian Davis writes "This Geoworks Press Release announces that they have U.S. and Japanese patents dating from 1994 covering some the essentials of the WAP and WML specs. They're demanding a license fee of $20,000 per year from all WAP phone manufacturers as well as WAP site owners. The WAP Forum have acknowledged the patent and their policy is to allow it provided the owners provide fair access to the technology covered. What do people think? Is this a fatal blow to U.S.-based WAP startups? Will it give the Europeans an even bigger lead in the WAP market?" The $20,000/year fee for WAP Web site operators is only for companies with $1 million or more in annual revenue. This _may_ not be as bad as it sounds.
Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)
/TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec.
/TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec.
:)
Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.
The
The
Now you should get moderated out of existance
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here.
WML is like HTML for mobile phones.
My main query of this patent is, how it applies to only the Wireless Application Protocal and not Dynamically generated HTML (I'm talking about Zope and ASP mainly - as these have server side Objects, and to a certain extent ECMAScript).
... this has other implications, in that they have not made it clear prior art is of course things such as the HyperCard browser (i believe this came much before HTML/Mosaic, i'm frequently wrong though ...)
I don't object to them wanting to make money out of their patent, but it's painfully obvious that they did *not* invent the WAP/WML standard. I'm not sure if they helped develop it (this is unlikely, as the claim would have been made earlier if this was so).
I go back to another of my comments on Patenting - is it such a good idea? (Has anyone read Bruce Sterling's Distraction? The bit where he talks about the Chinese broadbanding US Intellectual Property? Then you'll have an idea of what I'm trying to get at.)
Okay, back to Geoworks Patent - one of the things they've highlighted is the top-down hierarchy of implementating a "label" or "hint" and displaying it according to context. To me, this looks like what any sensible expert/AI display system would do - don't get me wrong, Internet Browsers are min-expert systems in that they make decisions on how to present the HTML to the user (IE also goes as far to fix missing TABLE tags).
Their white paper insists on calling the display application a "mini-browser"
.my 2p
.my 2p
- we have objects that need be presented to the user
- each object has mandatory requirements and advisory attributes
- the UI engine selects a UI implementation that satisfies mandatory requirements; if it can also satisfy advisory attributes, great; if not, well, life is tough
That is, I have a list of objects, and want to present it with a listbox (mandatory) with 2 columns (advisory), but my widget set has only 1-column listboxes, so I have no choice but use 1-column listbox. That's it.Will somebody stand up and challenge this nonsence in court?
Moderate this down (-1, YANA(P)L)
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
According to the Yahoo press release:
In May of 1999, Geoworks, in accordance with WAP Forum guidelines, was the first WAP member to announce its patented technology is employed as essential technology in the WAP standard.
It looks like WAP knew about this for 8 months.
So the WAP forum knew they were using Geoworks technology. No doubt this annoncement is after a bunch of negotiation between WAP and GeoWorks.
At least it's not like that nasty UNISYS/GIF thing.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
NewDeal is a separate company that bought the old GEOS GUI in, I believe, 1995 or 1996, and made marvelous changes to it. I wrote about it several times in my "Cheap Computing" column on andovernews.com and before that on Time Warner's Netly News, which is where I wrote (online) before Andover.
I still have NewDeal running in DRDOS 6.something on an old monochrome 386 laptop with a 20MB HD. Works fine. Nice little "full featured" office program. Its only flaw IMO is the WWW browser, which simply doesn't cut it on "modern" websites with frames, tables, etc.
DOS, NewDeal and a throwaway PC make a great training tool for small children. There are a lot of old DOS games around that are still new to a 4-year-old.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
The wap forum can do nothing but put a brave face on their ending. The $20,000 for companies will put anyone off meaning WAP will never get the rich content the web did. Nothing appears to preclude the patent owners from charging everyone later if the so wish.
There is a lesson here for the US goverment. Had their stupid algorithm patents got out of hand before the web they'd have no internet worth talking about, just a random bunch of computer wizards, universities and military sites
Alan