Microsoft Copies Idea, Admits It, Then Patents It

An anonymous reader writes "BlueJ is a popular academic IDE which lets students have a visual programming interface. Microsoft copied the design in their 'Object Test Bench' feature in Visual Studio 2005 and even admitted it. Now, a patent application has come to light which patents the very same feature, blatantly ignoring prior art."

Comments

WTF?-What, were, why, when.

[Anonymous Coward]

And who's going to sue them? Besides aren't you all command-line junkies? Visual IDE's indeed.

Re:Sick Software "Patents"

[Planesdragon]

Check for redundancy -- I guess you mean "In English".

Nope. The English language reached its pre-eminent world status largely due to the United States, and both American English and Australian English are markedly different from British English -- and each have approximately the same population of speakers are British English. If one simply mentions "English", it's appropriate to assume that they're talking about American English today, not British English.

Even beyond that, when discussing the differences in grammar between dialects of any language, it's appropriate to denote which dialect is which. Doubly so when discussing the differences between a foreign dialect and your current location's dialect. (So, if this where slashdot.uk, you'd have a leg to stand on.)

Re:Sick Software "Patents"

[jamesl]

If MS doesn't apply for/receive a patent, someone else will. That pantentholder will then sue the pants off anybody and everybody (with money) who tries to use anything that resembles bluej. That's the game and those are the rules. If you don't like the game, don't play. If you don't like the rules, get 'em changed.

It takes more than whining on Slashdot to fix this.

Re:Simply Amazing ... Kill ALL patetns

[ChrisMaple]

Airbags were forced on the car manufacturers by the government before sufficient R&D had been done to make them safer than not having airbags. To say that delays caused by patents cost lives in this case is the exact opposite of the truth. To say that airbags and antilock brakes have saved millions of lives in the last 20 years is a gross exaggeration. Not a large number of people get killed each year in auto accidents, and of those only a small number have been or could have been saved by either device.

These devices are expensive, and that expense can be quantified in the portion of a person's life required to pay for them. I haven't run the numbers, but there's a good chance that the expenses in terms of multiple partial lives exceeds the number of lives saved.

Patents are an alternative to secret science, which has its own disadvantages in terms of technologies that are lost forever, technologies the dissemination of which are delayed (delaying the advancement of science overall), and the expenses of reverse engineering. It's a tradeoff, and a good one. Saying it's worse than slavery is just stupid.