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Can Lotus Notes R3 Prior Art Save The Browser?
theodp writes "Apparently stunned by the implications of Eolas vs Microsoft, Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove fame offers up Notes R3 as prior art for the notorious Eolas patent. To bolster his argument, Ozzie used the Notes R3 feature set to recreate a scenario close to what was described in the patent. After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay, it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel."
microsoft wouldn't crash and burn for this, they've got plenty cash to buy top lawyers to defend them.
We should be grateful that this protects other browsers - because that's who Eolas will be after next.
Stemmo
Yes, because no matter how ridiculous the lawsuit is, if it's against someone you don't like, it's perfectly fine!
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Keep in mind, that if Microsoft is screwed over with abuse of a patent, you might be next.
Same thing with the abuse of any right or law. Keep in mind when the law is abused or a right trampled on, even for a good cause, the next time it may not be a good cause or it could be you that is being abused.
Fight Spammers!
One thing good about this entire issue of Eola patent is that it is likely to expose the danger of software patents and more people would become aware of it. Since microsoft, not any free software project is the victim, even PHBs would find it easy to understand
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
As much as I may not like Microsoft I have more of a problem with software patents. Do you think people looking to make a buck would stop at them? If you had thousands of cases like this going on it would be the end of the software industry.
There's prior art for a lot of what's been awarded a software patent. Besides that, a patent should only be awarded for a process or design that is non-obvious. The test for that is supposed to be a committee of highly credentialed people in the field to agree that its non-obvious. Few software "inventions" are non-obvious. The committee is filled with DeVry dropouts who donated enough to a campaign or two to get a committee seat. Hence the utterly stupid patents that have been awarded.
Well, what now, MS can try and invalidate the patent if this "discovery" is upheld in court, will that change MS for the better?. So morally what should we do?
1. The patent is outrageous, and demonstrate with a "GO MICROSOFT"
or should we wait until MS gives us a hint by replacing its index page with "in protest against software patents"?
I don't think a court would consider this a very good example of prior art. Consider that most any software patent would have been implementable in your favorite programming language ten years ago, if you'd thought of it. Whether the building blocks were lines of low-level code or statements in Notes is irrelevant. Now, if a copy of a Notes app that used that particular technique way back when could be found, it'd be a different story.
I strongly dislike software patents (I dislike patents, period), but that's no excuse to be sloppy in attacking one.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't like a lot of what Microsoft does and that I have issues with a lot of their software, particularly Internet Explorer. With that said... this is very much a good thing.
Eolas could easily proceed to sue the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, and anyone else who writes a browser with plugin technologies. That would be devastating for developers, users, and web designers. The News.com article linked in one of the previous articles on this topic points out that not only would the browser have to be revised, but far too many web pages as well.
Would I like to see Microsoft set back a bit, or at least forced to mess with IE some? Yeah. But this is a case that would affect all of us negatively, not just Microsoft. We owe Ray Ozzie some thanks for bringing this to light.
Mark Erikson
People are going to mod you (and probably me) down as being flamebait, but I was surprised at the outrage surrounding this lawsuit.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash. That's not the way we should be going. Accessibility, backwards compatability, and speed, are all important issues. Demanding people use Flash doesn't help with that. Slashdot recently linked to a hardware site that used Flash for its benchmark graphs.. no animation there, just blatantly unnecessary use of Flash.
Plugins encourage people to just throw plugins into their old crappy non-standards compliant browser rather than get a new one. There are people using Netscape 4 with Flash who are still perfectly happy.. they're like the elderly drivers in their 30 year old 'danger on the road' Chevys.
Plugins are like offering 'plugin upgrades' for cars. When your car gets slow, plug in a 'turbo' upgrade.. sure, it makes the car fast again, but your engine was busted up anyway, and you should just get a new one.
Without plugins we can rely on more integral browser support for proper standards like SVG, CSS, and the DOM.
You might argue that Flash is an open standard, but it's not. Macromedia updates it at such a fast pace that new features and methods are thrown in every few months. And, worse, Macromedia's Flash plugins and player take over 99.9% of the Flash playing marketplace.. meaning you're forced to follow their standard.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
Even though the fact-finding portion of the case is over, these facts may be admissible in a new case when Eolas goes after the next guy.
As a result, MS may still have to pay the $500M, but Mozilla et al may be spared from similar judgement. Sadly this could go to court and could be expensive if Eolas wants to pursue it with others... has anyone from the OSS browser community contacted Eolas? As others have suggested, they might be amenable to licensing it to that community and then a court proceeding might be avoidable altogether.
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you have questions about this, please email me at tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
How? The suit said that a browser that allowed you to open a page that needed a helper program to render/show content was not possible without licensing the patent. That means any plugins would be not allowed. Ok, that stops a couple of security holes, at least somewhat, but it means Java, Flash, QuickTime, etc. are no longer available.
MS could do two things once they accept the patent as valid: they could strip out all possibility of plugins for IE, or they could license the patent. As a quick guess, I'd say the latter would be easier. (And would put projects such as Mozilla is a bind, since they are not likely to be able to raise the money to pay for a license.)
(Quick conspirisary theory: If you assume MS could have come up with prior art, they might 'agree' to loose, if it meant they would have 'minor' license fees but there would be no other licenses, thereby driving out all their competition. Slightly over-paranoid, but it is MS...)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
While I have no love for Microsoft, this will be a good thing if it results in the defeat of this patent suit.
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I actually don't think it would matter if the suit followed to other browsers...as you well know, a lot of the way companies work (that make plug-ins, or any other for that matter) would make sure that the new version of the plug-in would work in IE FIRST, and then maybe if they had time, they'd make it work for everyone else. So, in the end, the other browsers would probably have to change the way they accept plug-ins as well anyway, so that it'd be easier for plugin-makers to port it.
I don't think this is the right thing to be attacking Microsoft for.
Ray Ozzie's a bright man. He might be a bit too much into bed with Microsoft for my tastes, but he can see how Eolas getting its way here is a B-A-D thing. It'd be like someone holding a patent on HTML.
What it would definitely help is if there were suits filed against Mozilla or Opera or other browesers.
Exactly.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I'm not for Microsoft or Eolas, nor am I against them in this case.
What I resent is this whole sordid litigious mess, the colossal waste of effort and money to get these cases sorted, and lawyers getting richer over a silly issue.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
But what's wrong with reading PDF files in the Acrobat viewer externally from the browser? If you download an MP3 from the Web, you don't really want it playing in your browser, you want it over in Winamp (or whatever you use). Ditto for PDF. A Web browser isn't meant to be an 'everything browser', no matter what Microsoft thinks.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
The situation may well be like the electronics industry in the 1950s and 1960s -- a few large corporations with extensive circuit patent portfolios built all the electronic devices, and avoided patent lawsuits by cross-licensing the portfolios back and forth. But little guys without a portfolio were effectively locked out. They couldn't afford to license the patented circuits they needed individually.
If this becomes the established practice, Microsoft and IBM and Sun and a few other companies will be able to write software "legally", but no one else will. I believe that RMS has written repeatedly that software patents have the potential to destroy the open-source software community.
Taken in another context, it's a bit like saying
If we dismiss the travesty that Eolas is trying to get away with because the victims are Microsoft and plug-ins, don't come bitching to me when you get sued off your ass for using a JPEG or GIF on your website.
No; surely the prior art is Excel v5, which has a built-in capacity for running plugins, not the mere fact that some kid decided to write this particular one. That he did so just makes it clear that Excel had this capability all along. It's Excel that's the prior art here, not this guy's plugin. As always, IANAL.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Link to Townsend, Townsend and Crew website. These are also the guys who went up against Microsoft in the class action lawsuit in California.
Maybe it's the law firm who wants to tackle Microsoft more than Doyle. Food for thought?
^_^
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Most individuals don't want,or need the ability to display chemcal structures.. But some users do. The plugin concept allows a small software developer to write a small library that handles interactive display, without having to persuade the mozilla or IE developers to incorporate the functionility in the main distribution.
Ideals aside -- and I believe in supporting the right thing even for questionable characters/companies -- it's pragmatic on every level to hope for a microsoft victory in this case.
You see, if they lose, they can actually turn this to their advantage. As others have observed, Microsoft can afford to pay licensing fees. Most developers of other browsers can't. Thus, if Microsoft were to lose or "settle," they'd simply be creating another barrier to entry in the browser market. Which is remarkably good for them in a time when their current browser is at a developmental dead end.
Tweet, tweet.
But why do you need plugins for that? I have my browsers configured to launch xpdf for pdf files (I could do the same thing with acroread, but I like xpdf better, and I have fewer problems printing with it). And conversely I have xpdf setup to launch a browser window when I click a link. I don't see why a plugin is necessary.
Funny you like PDF viewer to be a plugin. I'd much prefer PDFs be opened in a separate application according to it's MIME type, so that I have access to all the menu items, toolbar buttons, and can resize it independent of the browser window.
"Dr. Doyle (Eolas) isn't trying to squash Mozilla or anything like that. What he was hoping to do would be to force Microsoft, Sun, etc. to join an organization where they would standardize their architecture."
Yeah. To HIS requirements. This is no better than Microsoft driving the market. This is supposed to be a FREE market, folks. That means the CONSUMER drives it, not the suppliers. Even if we all agree that supplier A driving the market is totally evil, the solution is not to have supplier B pop up and take their place.
Then what if he doesn't like something Moz does? Perhaps he's in bed with a spammer, who is losing cash because of the popup blocking. Does the standard specify popup blocking? If not then Moz isn't strictly following the standards.
"This guy isn't the bad guy."
No, this guy is ANOTHER bad guy. He doesn't like the way MS is driving the market, and wants to drive it himself. The problem is not which supplier is driving the market, it's that the market is being driven by a supplier in the first place.
"Lotus is dead"
Yeah, but it wasn't some years ago, when this patent was applied for. That's the whole point of the article, if I read it correctly. If Lotus could do it back then, then the patent is rubbish.
PDF sucks too. Too many sites just use it do display stuff instead of using HTML. And PDF *NEVER* reflows to fit the page (I know its not supposed to, but its bloody well supposed to on the web), so this gets fucking anoying. If you want to watch the whole line its so small you can't read it, and if you zoom in, you have to drag the page left and right to read all of it!
And what, pray tell, PDF plugins exsist for MSIE apart from Adobes junk?
(Note to adobe: I don't agree with your licensen junk! I just click the button to read some stuff in that format!)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Well, with pdf you get:
Good typesetting. not crap like the html rendering
Mathematic formulas: Mathml isnt there yet, and looks crappy. People like to identify indeces without selecting bigger font sizes.
Vector charts: ditto for svg. not hear yet.
Also i can save a pdf on disk or print it. Try this with a web page. You may get dozens of gifs/jpegs/stuff, then there is a stylesheet missing, your other browser doesnt recognize the mathml, the font sizes are different and the ".gif" formulas dont match the rest of the text...
I wonder what problems everybody has with the page nature of pdf. I actually read a lot more text in books than on screen, and imho there is nothing wrong with defining a fixed lines per page relation or using the unit "page" to divide a bigger document in manageble portions.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Sorry, didn't read that article.
Of course, there is the third choice: just buy Eolas. I'm fairly sure MS has the cash, if it wants it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Wow - so many "Flash is evil" postings.
/. - we need to be considerate of them too.
I have the Flash plugin installed in Linux and Windows. It's NO INCONVENIENCE AT ALL to download a file less than 700 KB in size and install it.
Of course there are places where Flash usage is excessive or relied on too much, but there are many places where it is appropriate.
As a web developer, I know how hard it is to mimick the interactivty and animation. Flash is a mature product, it has many features that are impossible/very difficult to implement using XHTML/DOM/CSS/JavaScript/SVG/DHTML/etc.
When I develop a web page where I am given Flash to embed, I also provide a plain text alternative - and I make a point of making it looking as simple/boring as possible. That way visually impaired visitors can still use the site, and those "Flash is evil" users can be punished with very un-appealing presentation. I mean these technologies have been around for years - designed to enrich our browsing experience. Why not accept it and get on with life?
Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in Flash. Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in W3C technologies. Flash vector animations are very small - higher quality and much smaller than the equivalent animated gif or DHTML.
The Flash plugin is quite cross browser/operating system friendly. Imagine the headaches accomplishing the same interactivty/animation using W3C code. Browsers don't adhere to standards perfectly.
Some tech users may find plugins evil or inconvenient - why? Think of the 100 times more people who aren't techies - think how they appreciate the simplicity of plugins. Just one or two "OK" clicks if they don't have the plugin - and they are viewing the plugin content.
The internet is a heterogenous store of many different forms of media - user friendly browsing is achieved by browsers capable of displaying multiple media formats IN THE BROWSER. This includes PDF, Flash and M$ Office files. The general internet population is not as savvy as many of us on
Mike
- No more plugins in any browser - I would enjoy whole Internet using only official and open web stabdards;
- No more software patents - no comments on that as such befits are two obvious for all normal people;
But I'm afraid that IBM will come up right at the last moment with something from their huge patent library and say:Less is more !
Wouldn't Apple's Hypercard (and 'hypertext' links) demonstrate much of the same?
Never pet a burning dog.