Slashdot Mirror
Could Eolas End Microsoft's Browser Dominance?
rustynail writes "The tiny Eolas web company is about to lock horns with Microsoft in a legal battle over a patent that Eolas owns covering all uses of plugins, applets, activeX controls and other similar technology. The difference here is that, according to
this article Eolas might not accept a payout: instead
they might exclude IE from using these technologies at all.. opening the way for a new browser war." We mentioned this dispute a few years ago, too, but an outcome to the Justice Department's case against Microsoft was far off in 1998.
A patent which, if you check was first demonstrated in 1993 (when WWW traffic was 1% of the whole backbone) and filed in '94. And what was the big Netscape breakthrough in 1995? SERVER PUSH.
Having everything integrated under one hood is only an obvious solution in hindsight.
--DocL---
If it wasn't for half of the people in this country, the other half would be all of them -- Col. Stoopnagle
The patent in question can be found here.
Read the patent itself. My intepretation of the patent is that he saw OLE in Microsoft Office and, as all predatory patent offenders do, he broadened the scope and then claimed invention (he actually even references OLE in his patent : "Other existing approaches to embedding interactive program objects in documents include the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) facility in Microsoft Windows...At least one shortcoming of these approaches is that neither is capable of allowing a user to access embedded interactive program objects in distributed hypermedia documents over networks." ActiveX, a misnomer for COM, is a growth of OLE. Given that this guy references it in his patent, obviously Microsoft has prior art on that.)
His "invention" appears to be when these plug-ins perform work on another machine and then return the results. i.e. An embedded window in a "hypertext document" that requests information from a networked computer and then displays it. This seems to be the kind of patent that infuriates Slashdot normally, so it's perplexing how anyone would lines up to cheer them on, or to pretend that they're underdogs
This is hardly the most important issue, but it occurs to me that the pronunciation of the word 'Eolas' (which is the Irish word for 'knowledge') might not be obvious to non-Irish-speakers. To assist you in participating in heated verbal debate on this topic, I offer the following pronunciation guide:
For those of you who don't speak IPA, this means it almost rhymes with 'toeless', and begins with a sound similar to the English word 'owe'.
I hope this will spare you the embarrassment of using pronunciations such as "Yo-lass" or "Ee-owe-lass".
Slashdot does not have a unified view about this issue. This isn't some political party.
If you mean to say that everyone who reads Slashdot doesn't necessarily have the same view, then of course you're correct. But then your comment about political parties would be wrong, since in any party there are always dissenters about platforms central to the party (consider say, abortion, or capital punishment, or welfare, and the Democratic and Republican parties).
Almost certainly the original poster meant his comment as a form of shorthand, a reference to the dominant view (or at least the most vocal or up-moderated). Not everyone has the same view here, certainly. But there is a prevalent opinion that is propagated by the most up-moderated posts and the editors. If you can't see that, you're just blind.