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Can Lotus Notes R3 Prior Art Save The Browser?

Posted by michael on from the ozzie-wan-kenobi-you're-my-only-hope dept.

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."

2 of 522 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps a "Prior Art" effort/community is needed.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm beginning to wonder..... perhaps a community "Prior Art" effort, somewhat comparable to the open source community, is needed.

    Identify, research and debunk such absurd/greedy patents (and perhaps eventually much or all of the software patents nonsense) so as to get the patents withdrawn/cancelled.... and/or reassigned to some "open source" holder.

    Might eventually be able to deconstruct much of the current software patent farce.

    Or perhaps the "open source" community could get some showstopper patents of its own, to use as leverage against overreaching/absurdist patent holders holders to. Perhaps even get other altruistic patent holders to donate their patents to a pool of such patents held by an "open source" protector, so as to grow them and increase the leverage.

  2. Re:Wrong (think PDF) by Xolotl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Flash is overused, both for static graphics and for needless bloated front pages where the rest of the site is in normal HTML. However, plugins have many good uses, perhaps most importantly for viewing PDFs. Being able to just click on a PDF and read it is great for me - practically all scientific papers are distributed as PDF these days. And since both PDF viewers and PDF writers are available in open source, it's not really a problem even if the standard itself is proprietary.

    Patenting plugins is like patenting the idea of DIY home improvement - ludicrous (although I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already patented the latter...)