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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.
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