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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."
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absurd/greedy patents (and perhaps eventually much or all of the software patents nonsense) so as to get the patents withdrawn/cancelled....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.
yeah but why billions when we can have... millions ?
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.
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.
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
You clearly forgot the IANAL part. This is a civil case, Microsoft can easily appeal. This isn't a criminal murder case...
>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).
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...)
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.
"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.
Tell me we wouldn't do a better job than the patent office...