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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.
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
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.
That should be: "Eolas is probably sad that MicroSoft hasn't bought them outright"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.