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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.
or something like that.
As much as I dislike Microsoft I am glad they told those patent lizards to take a hike.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
This whole case makes me feel violated. Not only is it a patent-troll case, but it's one that makes me side with Microsoft on something. I feel so unclean...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
> Eolas Chief Operating Officer Mark Swords called on the software maker to purchase a patent license instead of worsening the browsing experience.
Gee, who would've guessed they're interesting in selling a patent license...
Hopefully MS' actions here will put a damper on all those ludicrous patents and their holders to collect.
I hope Eolas spent a bundle on litigation and gets nothing in return. That'll teach them.
On a computer or under a hood.
"Some guy's suit forced MS to make changes of their own choosing which will cause web developers to change their architecture which are a dissapointment, yet strengthen MS's case."
What changes are the dissapointment? What the hell are you talking about? How about a link or two, or using a word other than "change"?
Yeah, I know. -1, Offtopic
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.
I'm seeing a lot of these comments side with Microsoft here, stating that Eolas is patent trolling. But, if Linux were to really take off, don't you think Microsoft would start filing a bunch of infringement lawsuits against Linux (or other F-OSS), in the same way Eolas did to Microsoft?
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.
That should be: "Eolas is probably sad that MicroSoft hasn't bought them outright"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
You can find the changes Activating ActiveX Controls.
Seems like some simple work arounds for newly developed applications. Hate to retrofit all the existing stuff out there.
I think perhaps one reason they are avoiding buying a patent license is because they are planning on doing away with activex. I've already heard the xmlhttprequest used for Ajax will be built in to IE7 and not as an activex control. Its possible other things like Flash and Acrobat will do the same.
Sounds like a PR stunt trying to make MS look bad for going around their patent instead of paying royalties. He already got 500 million; he's upset he's not getting even more.
At least this will keep the other browsers safer from further litigation down the road. If MS had bent over backwards and paid, every other browser that ever gained any market share would have been next in line to pay retroactive royalties. Now that MS just changed the rules of the HTML world (as usual), it's not crazy to think other browser vendors won't be ready to follow just to avoid having to pay the costly lesson that MS had to pay.
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
If every patent victim were to utter those words to the person or corporation attempting to shake them down, the incentive to perpetrate such frauds would be gone.
The problem is that corporations like Microsoft typically have a short-term mentality that tells them, "If we litigate, it will cost X. If we pay them off, it will cost Y." They then pay off the con artists if X > Y. Unfortunately this doesn't take into consideration the fact that this rewards bad behavior and leads to the paying of infinite more Ys in the future.
I applaud Microsoft's decision and I hope Eolas goes down in flames.
I'm a big tall mofo.
These changes sound a lot like a variant of Flashblock to me.
Yeah, that's right, these changes that "worsen the user experience" are almost identical to the functionality of a rather popular Firefox extension.
I consider requiring user input to run ActiveX controls to be a Good Thing. Thank you Eolas for finally forcing MS to make drive-by malware autoinstallation more difficult.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What a coincidence! I'm dissapointed there aren't more Flash developers dying in horrible gardening accidents.
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.
I have read 5 articles on this whole thing now. I still am not sure exactly what it is that Eolas has patented... the ability to run activeX without clicking an extra button? or something about havign external applications of any kind able to process content inside the browser window? Can anyone explain?
Also, I found this quote from Eolas:
"We released our browser back in 1995 to the world free for non-commercial use, so that should be an indicator to people that the open-source community shouldn't have anything to fear from us. "
Does Firefox/mozilla use any of the disputed technology? I would guess not if it's only ActiveX we're dealing with, but I'm not sure.. quicktime and realplayer were mentioned in one article. Any then I wonder, if Eolas really won't go after open source projects that use their tech, then could Firefox be outfitted to do exactly what IE will no longer be able too, and so then save people the trouble of redesigning all these sites?
-Lod
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.
Well, having had a quick look at the MSDN article linked to from the eWeek article, it doesn't look like such a big deal.
If the object is instantiated by in-line code, it will still respond to scripting commands but will not respond to user commands until they click somewhere in particular. If an external "JScript" file (does it hurt that much to say "Java", M$?!?!), is used to instantiate the object, there is no change in the way the page will behave.
So, we can make minor changes to all our ActiveX control-embedding pages to keep them behaving the way they do now, or not. The world will not end.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
You realize you can recode your sites to use JavaScript load the Flash objects from an external file, right, and thus avoid the "having to click a button" issue?a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp
:-)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/
So this is a payday for you. Your clients will pay you to recode the sites; and the recoding is pretty trivial, so it's almost like getting money for free.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Consider Microsoft's alternatives:
(1) Continue to infringe on Eolas' patent. Eventually Eolas will sue again, causing MSFT to pay more damages.
(2) Buy a license from Eolas.
(3) Change IE so it no longer infringes. Pay Eolas nothing.
You see, #1 and #2 would make Eolas money. #3 makes Eolas no money. In this light, could we expect Eolas' executives to say anything else about Microsoft's decision? Apparently, they're not happy with $520 million -- and their attitude to Microsoft's decision to work around the patent tells us all we need to know about Eolas' motivations.
This is a shakedown for money, pure and simple. It's yet another abuse of the patent system. They'll take MSFT for as much as they can, and anything MSFT does to stop loss, Eolas will regard as "unfortunate."
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft -- but if a thief steals from an tyrant, that doesn't make the thief's transgression any less severe or more permissible.
Visit the puke's web site. They've trademarked the words "Invented Here".
(and no, I'm not going to link to it; it's obvious and it will prevent them from blocking referrals from Slashot)
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
a version of the original open-source Mosaic with their embedded media plugin code. granted, that was before the term "Open Source" became vogue. Prior to that it was simply "well, is it GPL'ed or just BSD or MIT'ed?".
it got little attention outside the browser development world (Netscape 1.0 was out by then, and stealing the whole show), but it was demoed to Netscape and Sun in the lead-up to Java embedding in Netscape 2.0, so it is prior art to Java in the browser (and thus, flash, shockwave, and the whole ActiveX concept, much less Mozilla's plug-in architecture).
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Would the license fees have been charged on a per copy basis? If so, how could Microsoft let people download IE for free (as in beer)?
Depends on what you're talking about. Cookies were invented to hold user information, reading that user information instead of asking for it again in order to sell something shouldn't be considered non-obvious in any way. Perhaps the only reason it's not obvious is because everyone else would add a confirmation before a sales contreact is established to prevent accidental orders.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Love it or hate it, IE is the currently most used browser. And this is one of the significant features of it. Since Eolas has no competing product, why do they deserve a penny? They can't show any damages. They can't show that they sold their idea to someone else who Microsoft ran out of business. All they can do is say we'll prevent the Internet from being a more convenient place unless we're paid lots of money.
I'm sorry that Eolas is sad that Microsoft is going to byte the bullet and dodge their patent. Wrong! I'm actually not sorry at all!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Exactly my thoughts...if Amazon didn't invent cookies nor the mouse click, and we can presume the obviousness of the fact that 1 click to purchase is more desirable than multiple clicks, why should everyone else be forced to make their purchase process more complicated just because Amazon was able to get to the USPTO first? If someone borrows something from Amazon's particular implementation of the 1 click purchase, it is fair for a patent to protect them, but to patent 1 click is akin to patenting the idea of of a doorknob that only requires one hand and forcing all other doorknob makers to make knobs which require both hands to operate.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Why isn't this made clear in any of the stories on this? It would certainly reduce the amount of hyperventilating.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
$500,000,000 has my name all written over it :) :) :)
...but it is a very real problem. As soon as the company I work for started doing good business, we showed up on the radar of a whole pile of patent trolling companies. One company had a patent on storing customer subscription information in a "computer file". And we had to cough up the money. Currently we're under attack from another company that has a patent on notifying postal carriers to pick up packages "using a computer".
Patenting these "inventions" did not in any way help society. We came up with them ourselves without even a moment of thought. So did everyone else who does business today. And these patent troll companies just go around and extort money from anyone who becomes financially successful. They do it because the letter of the law supports them in doing so.
As an example of how ridiculous it is -- the threats we get aren't even because they know we're violating a patent. They just send a letter saying basically "you are using computers to do business, so we're pretty sure you're violating one of our patents. Cough up x dollars or prove you're not violating through a very expensive legal process". As long as they price the settlement less than the likely cost of the legal process, a business will usually have to pay up in the interest of their shareholders.
On the consumer side you may not see it as stifling innovation, because companies don't shut down, they pay up and move on. And they usually can't talk about it afterwards. But a real loss of time and money has taken place that would have otherwise gone to many better things... innovation, lower prices, better wages. This patent crap makes most companies less efficient, in the interest of a very few companies that don't even offer anything in the marketspace they hold their patents in. It's just bad, bad, bad.