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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."
I was really hoping this suit would make for a better IE.
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 --
It's a half BILLION dollar lawsuit.
$500M, not $500k.
Specifically, 521 million dollars.
Something tells me Eolas broke out the champagne after that verdict...
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!
"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"
He really needs to get laid.
Only in a limited number of circumstances would a case be re-opened to present newly discovered evidence. The fact finding stage of this case is over. I doubt this information will be of any use now.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
He has valid licenses for DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Excel! Otherwise, he could be in some trouble with Microsoft.
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
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.
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?
The whole patent was based around the idea of plugins. His methodology was to build a plugin, exactly as described in the patent, that fits into Notes architecture. He didn't modify the Notes base-code at all. This is perfectly legitimate.
Did you read the article? And the patent in question? We're not talking about the potential to implement something, but something that was used quite often. And we're not talking about building blocks, low-level code, or "statements". Maybe you should go back and read the article over again.
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.
>copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay,
Does that mean that Microsoft did refuse to send any free copy of an obsolete software to anybody who may spare them half a billion dollars?!
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
AC comments get piped to
What? He did exactly what the patent claimed, with a stock version of Notes using the features the way they were advertised. He didn't do any programming here, unless you call writing HTML (or its equivalent in Notes) programming. If you do, then the patent has *never* been implemented without the user doing programming.
He did the equivalent of writing a web page that required a plug in and showing that it worked. You would have to do the same with IE to prove it infringed the patent.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I like your thinking...
You are most definately not new here.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
For a good summary of the case, check out this page. Read the whole thing for a good summary of all the mitigating facts that make this a totally non-frivolous lawsuit.
..wayne..
I hate MS, but hopefully this thing can be beat. (Did I sum up the first 50 posts properly?)
That is exactly what he did:
and from Mr. Ozzie's article:
I strongly dislike software patents (I dislike patents, period), but that's no excuse to be sloppy in attacking one.
I too dislike sloppy refutation of unfair claims, although I don't believe in the "baby out w/bathwater" school of dealing with the current patent crisis (it is a crisis), and as long as I'm dealing in cliche's today, I also think that one should follow one's own advice.
Read, L
From the article:
These documents, applications and solutions are hosed on a server analogous to today's "Web application servers".
That's a true assessment of Lotus Notes if I ever saw one.
The only good thing about such patents is that they expire in 20 years, and you only have 1 year after you publish the idea to apply for a patent. So ancient stuff is fortunately rulled out.
The Raven
...if this proves to be the thing that lets us keep plugins in the public domain.
As a Flash developer, the idea that users would have to take some convoluted route to access a movie I made just so some fat jerk can get rich really ticks me off.
The U.S. Patent Office needs to get up to speed and stop issuing patents on trivial systems features. I mean, using sub-programs in programs is something I have done in C++ since the late 80s. WTF Why is a Web browser supposed to be so special a thing that someone can issue a patent on a standard engineering process?
M
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...)
If you did use it for customers in the disputed time frame, then your use has satisfied the commercially valuable part.
Basically patents are instruments in commerce. Something was allowed to be patented, i.e. denied to rest of society, if it was shown to have a commercial value, and hence an incentive for the patent holder or agents thereof. It was believed that the benefits from an inventor implementing a patent dwarfed the negatives of denying the rest of the society from being able to freely build upon it.
Your using it for cutomers means that the patent cannot be claimed under new-use as there is nothing "new" about it, and Ray's whole article shows that the patent can't be claimed under "new" method as neither is the method new.
Guess, it means that the patent should be busted.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Especially the Cookies thing.
Without them, there is absolutely no way for web based applications to maintain state across pages, meaning that there's hardly a web application in the world that would still work.
Sheesh...
There's also some real compelling java applets too - like a Library catalogue I rememeber using once.
And Flash... Well, I tend to mostly agree with you, but oh well.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
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...
Eolas: "Internet Explorer uses plug-ins?! WTF?! When did M$ start doing that? I invented those things, dammit! I'mma sue 'em" In fairness, Eolas started making noises about this stuff early in 1995, and did notify the browser vendors that applets would be covered by their patent application. All said they'd wait and see if the patent was approved before doing anything. So the patent was approved, no one had done anything, and after a bunch of hearings and appeals, here we are. So, the Eolas thing was hardly a surprise. The big surprise is that so little apparent effort went into coming up with decent alternatives until the last minute.
The pdf standard is completely free and open. Adobe does not charge any fees or in any way restrict you from using pdf, not only that but they have the complete spec available for download on their site (as well as all of the past iterations of the standard!) That is why Ghostscript ps2pdf and all those other tools are allowed to exist.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Sun Tzu's old adage of the enemy of your enemy is my friend always applies, but in this case we know the enemy of your enemy will be tunning on you soon which is why you should strike down all your enemies and potential enemies as soon as possible.
Microsoft crashing and burning along with Eolas is fine by me.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
IANAL (nor are probably 99% of the other people commenting), but this may not count as prior art. The important thing about prior art is that it is made up PRIOR to the patent in question. If someone patented the wheel, and I then read the patent (think blueprint) for it, I too could take a hammer, saw, chisel, etc. and scream "Look how obvious this is!"
In this case, if someone can prove they created a similar combination of program(s) prior to October 17, 1994, that would stand a much better chance of invalidating the patent. A mockup done in 2003 likely will not.
even PHBs would find it easy to understand
Hee, hee!
Moi: This patent will make Mozilla illegal.
Boss: I don't understand. I'll have to schedule a meeting with the IP guys sometime next year.
Moi: This patent makes Internet Explorer illegal.
Boss: Horrors! I'll get the lawyers digging for prior art right now!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If Microsoft needs prior art to disprove these patents perhaps they should have a look at X Windows and any version of Unix circa 1993. I used to do exactly what these patents claim using a threaded news reader called xrn. In addition to being obvious and therefore not patentable it was common practice in a variety of applications including Framemaker to name just one commercial application that did this. I certainly hate to be the one to help out M$ but some of these software patents are debilitating.
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.
Ultimately, all the technically adept -> sexually undesirable propaganda among the nerd community is self-defeating. Girls like guys who talk big, not guys who commiserate about being losers.
For a counter-example, take a look at the Jews. They have managed to tie male intelligence into sexual desirability for thousands of years. Torah scholars get some serious action. And all of is based on a concerted propaganda effort by those same Torah scholars. You should read the stuff they write. It is a constant barage of "study the Bible and get women hanging all over you."
Sure, that sort of eugenics program has not resulted in too many Jewish supermodels, but damn if they don't make great physicists, doctors, and lawyers.
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.
The abuse of patent protections used not to inovate but to be supress them is necessary to point out the absurdity of our current patent laws. If judgements in suits like these were based on the actual value that had been created by the patent holder instead of the value created by the patent infringer, the protections provided by patents would make a lot more sense. This would prevent people creating patents as a direct revenue source instead of creating patents to protect actual products they're producing. A patent by itself would only be capable of preventing someone from infringing it but not as tool for extortion.
At a really fundamental level, how different is transparently running a plug-in on a web page different from a program written in C or C++ causing a DLL written in Assembler to execute?
Are printer (and other device) drivers all that different than plug-ins?
When I click the Print icon, aren't I in effect asking the operating system to transparently execute a separate ("plug-in") program, the printer driver, to perform a task for me?
Or am I missing the point here?
Read this!
It's a USA Today story from the cover (!) in 1996.
Important points:
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. He declared the current state of things then as a "hodgepodge", and it still is today (EJB vs. NET vs. DCOM vs. SOAP vs. agent archs). He claimed he would provide free licenses to anyone who would cooperate. He also thought maybe he'd get funding from some guy who was afriad of Microsoft or Oracle, and wanted his help to one-up what they had.
That ain't going to happen now.
I'm pretty sure he's cutting his losses and JUST going after the biggest fish in the pond.
You can also read his letter to the readership of DDJ (they had many of the same opinions as Slashdotters I've read so far).
Scroll down to the letters section. You may need to sign up for access. Alternatively, I will include a quote without permission.
This guy isn't the bad guy. He's just a dude who tweaked up his web browser for medical imageing, and had a bright idea. The University hired Townsend, Townsend and Crew to file the patent, and they couldn't come up with anything at the time. Maybe the weren't Lotus users?
In any case, since this guy wasn't a CS major (Biology), he probably wouldn't have been privy to Lotus. He was an academic Unix guy, and Lotus was big in business circles. I can't blame him, and think Ray Ozzie needs to get off his soapbox.
Lotus is dead man, don't give Microsoft any ammo. Doyle wants Microsoft to start playing nice, and you're undermining that. Great way to see your vision through Ozzie; they (Ozzie and Doyle) both had the same vision and I think he fails to realize how alike their thinking and motives are.
Microsofts' are less pure.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Did the inventor take several years to get around to sueing Microsoft? Or did they spend a couple of years in pointless un-negotiations? Many corporations will pretend to be negotiating while sending their legal beagles trying to break the patent instead. Some companies would rather spend $10,000,000 to break a patent that the inventor only wants $500,000 for. Some inventors want to stiff companies for $100,000,000 when their invention is worth $100,000. One can find cases to support any position you want. Which is what legal briefs are supposed to do.
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.
The problem with patents isn't that they're granted too easily. It isn't that patents are granted for obvious processes, or processes already in existence. It isn't even that patents can hide in a product for years, gaining in popularity, before the patent owner demands payment (though that particular aspect really disgusts me). The real problem with patents is that there's no financial cap on the "reward" the patent owner can demand.
In this case, Eolas got half a BILLION dollars. I can't imagine that even if this patent has merit (I don't think it does) that the staff at Eolas have truly produced something of that worth. There is no way Eolas invested anything like that into research for their patent. Even if Eolas had a rare genius on their staff who invented something truly unique and revolutionary, no single person can produce half a BILLION dollars of worth.
Oh sure, that's just "capitalism" somebody will say. The property owner gets to pick the price. Mysterious "market forces" will sort everything out. But in the case of patents there are no market forces. Patent owners enjoy a monopoly where nobody can legally compete. The patent owners can set their prices sky-high and nobody can undercut them.
Rather than putting the onus on the patent review process to "weed out" the bad patents - which I personally believe is an impossible task - there should instead be a financial valuation done of patents before they are granted. The patent owner can document their expected earnings from the patent. If the patent owner poorly estimates the expected earnings (claims a future earning of $1mill but collects half a BILLION dollars) then something is almost certainly wrong.
This way companies (incl. Microsoft) can easily identify any patents that may financially harm them in the future and invest more effort into disproving their merit. If the patent owner truly believes their patent is worthy then they can invest more time and money into defending the patent. This is pure self-interest at work, so I have every confidence that it will work.
The current patent system is like a lottery. The fix is to make it accountable. My idea might not be practical for reasons I cannot see, but I'm convinced that something similar to it will fix the patent system.
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.
Obviously it won't help you see pages what REQUIRE you to use Flash, but if you use MSIE and don't wanna see all those Flash commercials all over the place, this bit will prevent Flash from loading.
e t Explorer0 00}
;)
tart regedit, find
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software
Microsoft
Intern
ActiveX Compatibility
{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540
And add as a dword:
"Compatibility Flags"= 1024
This sets the "Kill bit" for Flash, meaning that MSIE won't install it if it isn't installed, and wont load it if it already is installed.
(if you don't have the {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} bit, then add it - but be sure to get all the numbers right. One digit wrong and you are casting a curse on something else)
If you don't trust the magic of others, don't click the button Luke *G*
Usual caveats reply; if you machine blows up, your harddrive fries, your wife leaves you... tough luck buddy
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?
Why does everyone have to incessantly shout
IANAL
IANAL
IANAL
over and fucking over again? Yes, we know that you are one of, I don't know, 5 and a half billion NONLAWYERS.
Christ, do people who sit around in the pub aruging politics and football routinely interject:
By the way guys, you might not want to listen to what I have to say next because--crap!--I just realized, I'm not a lawyer.
No, they don't. Now, will you people quit it already?. It is perfectly acceptable to make an observation without being a lawyer--if you're wrong, someone who knows better will inform you.
This meme, much like the people who use the word meme, ought to be shot.
Thank you and goodnight,
Anonymous Coward.
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 !
Tell me we wouldn't do a better job than the patent office...
Rational people don't "hate Microsoft", they "hate Microsoft's conduct"--anti-competitive business practices, vaporware, shoddy software development, aggressive purchases of startups, bundling deals, etc.
Eolas patent not only is a software patent, it is a bad software patent, and there is prior art. Microsoft is clearly getting a raw deal here and they are being wronged by Eolas. On this matter, the open source community should take Microsoft's side.
However, if you still like something to "hate" about Microsoft, it is that they keep bungling their legal cases. IANAL, but it really sounds like Microsoft got a much worse result than they should have. While prior art and other defenses often are apparently difficult to make during the first legal round, it seems like Microsoft managed to get potential prior art (the Viola browser) thrown out, and there were several other unfavorable rulings against them during the trial. For that, you can "hate" them, because with billions upon billions of dollars in the bank, Microsoft should be able to hire better lawyers. It seems, Microsoft's lawyers are as shoddy and inexperienced as their programmers.