Slashdot Mirror
Eolas COO Says IE Changes A Shame
capt turnpike writes "Hot on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of a 60-day period in which Web developers will have to change their pages' architecture, the COO of Eolas, the company whose suit forced these changes, gives an interview to eWEEK.com in which he says these changes are a disappointment. Confused? From the article: 'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,' His position is that publicizing these forced changes strengthens MS's case."
From the point of view of his cash flow...
the completely broken patent and copyright system in the U.S. that allows such ridiculous lawsuits to happen in the first place, which encourages companies like Microsoft to file thousands of "defensive" patents per year, exacerbating the problem. But nobody can figure out what stifles innovation....hmm.
Is making ActiveX harder to use a bad thing? "By Microsoft's own admission, IE users will only be able to interact with Microsoft ActiveX controls loaded in certain Web pages after manually activating their user interfaces by clicking on it or using the Tab and Enter keys."
What I read...
Why would they change? They should just pay us and our layers instead. If they don't pay, we may actually have to take a risk and develop something based on our patent or we will go broke. So yes America, and all that is reading our press release, Microsoft is bad, not us. Repeat that 10 times to as many people as you know and it will eventually become the truth.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,'
You sued them, and apparently won, resulting in two paths of action for Microsoft. Stop the infringing activity, or pay you to be allowed to continue.
They indeed made a choice. Too bad it wasn't the one you wanted.
Probably, and then the same people here would in that instance not side with Microsoft. None of the comments here are "Microsoft is in the right here, and therefore we must agree with everything they do forever". It IS possible to support a position rather than an entity.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
It seems like by taking this action, Microsoft is actually *reenforcing* the validity of software patents. Yes, bully to them for refusing to pay licensing, but by dropping the disputed technology, Microsoft is tacitly admitting that the patent is valid.
Of course that makes total sense, giving the MS is patenting software techniques left and right, and has reserved the right to sue Free Software distributors over it. If they can get e.g. RedHat to devote person-hours to removing patented algorithms from their distribution, then that's time and money that they're essentially forcing RedHat to throw out the window.
Causation can cause correlation
It isn't just the microsoft fee.
Since IE is (unfortunately) the defacto standard browser, others (if they infringe at all) will follow the lead, and Microsoft will take all the pain of getting web developers to change to cope with the changes.
The Eolas guy is annoyed because MS routed around his toll bridge, and now everyone else will see the way to go round too, and all his future revenues just evaporated.
The Slashdot crowd continues to underestimate Microsoft and misunderstand the market. The reaction to all of this is proof of that.
Quick question: what's more important ease of use or openess of code? (Watch people talk about how you can have both and how their pet project will bring this about.)
Simply put, the web is the biggest threat to Microsoft and they're continuing to neutralize it. This is the same type of smart move they made when they stopped shipping Java because "they were forced to". Consistent ubiquitous client-side technologies that aren't controlled by Microsoft are dangerous to them. This move is all about neutralizing Flash by stacking on some FUD.
"We don't need Flash!", I hear you all scream "We have Ajax!" --- think about it, what's the difference between Flash and a browser? Microsoft controls the browser. (And it's very very unlikely that that will change as long as Windows is the dominant OS.) They're going to continue to make enchancements and include bugs in their browser that will make it less productive to do cross-browser development and then provide tools and features for Windows only use that will sidetrack people doing standards based development.
The web development community is falling into the same trap that Microsoft used to win the first browser war.