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New IE Disables Netscape-style Plug-ins
Snibor Eoj writes: "In his latest column, Robert Cringely takes a look at Microsoft's motivation for disabling Netscape API plug-ins in IE. As always with Cringely, it's an interesting take on things. We'll see how this one turns out..." Among other things, this will disable Quicktime plugins.
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).
credo quia absurdum
How does this affect IE on the Mac? Internet Explorer isn't just Windows-reliant, you know.
You mean I won't be able to watch QuickTime videos with IE on Linux anymore?
Of course I'm kidding: I always immediately leave any site that *requires* a plugin of any kind. If you can't take a picture of it, write some words about it or (in a rare case) make a video of it in a format everybody can read, I'm not interested.
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