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Microsoft Ordered To Pay $290M, Stop Selling Word
Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."
Does this mean patents are good? Where do I, as an average slashbot, stand on this issue today?
Now that MS is at the receiving end of the stick on one of their BIGGEST money making products, I wonder if we might see their tune change on support for software patents...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
--Greg
You are wrong. The lawsuit and patent are very narrow and only affect an obscure feature of Microsoft Word that is used by a very small percentage of users. They do not have anything to do with the Office Open XML file format (otherwise this suit wouldn't just be Microsoft Word, it would be all the apps).
i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims).
I think you're wrong. From the coverage I've read, it's a method of processing and manipulating XML documents, and they designed an piece of XML editing software around it which they showed to Microsoft and Microsoft then stole the ideas from.
It does not predate XML, and has nothing to do with XML-based standards. For instance, i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Symphony etc. infringe their patent.
I'm sure some kind person will come along and back me up on this one.
Pirate Party UK
Your post is a load of horseshit and furthers my fears that you're a Microsoft shill (your bing posts are borderline brilliant).
This is stupid because Microsoft was moving here to open XML standards from their propriety .doc format. It's a common thing to blame MS for their locked in, own formats since Open Office and others couldn't open them.
What's your point? That since they're being attacked by a patent troll I should forgive them for everything fucking stupid and backward they've done?
i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims [uspto.gov]).
Your expertise as a patent examiner is priceless to me. As is your extreme simplification of something you know nothing about.
"Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date."
They could, you know, settle with i4i and license the patent from them?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think i4i's patent is legitimate (I'm not really very familiar with this case - somehow missed it before this, will need to study up on it more later). I'm just saying, the list of options seems to leave out one pretty big possibility.
From the abstract of TFP:
"A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers, removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of operation."
--Greg
World of Warcraft uses XML for it's UI
http://www.wowwiki.com/XML_user_interface
Power structures serve the powerful first. Microsoft wants the patent regime, but it doesn't want situations like this. When the powerful get shafted, then we can expect patent reform.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
that i4i's stock price grew THREE sizes that day.
Something doesn't add up here. Why is i4i not simply willing to license the rights to use the patent to MS (for an exorbitant fee). Why ask for it to be removed? Seems like a license to print money.
They're not a patent troll in that way that they did actually come up with the same system before everyone else......i4i was silent for years, everyone started using XML
Sounds like a patent troll to me.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'm personally shocked, because microsoft doesn't have a reputation of working with smaller companies, failing to close a contract, and then releasing their own very similar products.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Briefly reading over the patent in question, I'm curious how this patient was granted given that it resembles IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) from the 1960s and the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standardized by the ISO in 1986.
Just for good measure, I still refuse to use XML in any application I design. I have no intentions of changing that any time soon either.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I assume you know that OOXML is a proprietary MS format couched in the clothing of an international standard? That it was only approved by ISO after MS manipulated the procedures, bribed partners to stack committees, and completely destroyed the technical committee? Where MS is now abusing the "correction of drafting errors" mechanism to make material changes to the standard so that it continuously conforms to the behaviour of MS's proprietary software (including reversing changes specifically made by the ISO committee!) -- instead of having their software conform to the so-called "standard". This is not to say I support software patents, especially on trivial ideas like a specific format for embedding proprietary data in an XML file (what i4i has "invented"). However, you should not fall for the MS "openness" scam. Just because it's XML doesn't mean it's not Microsoft.
The powerful (business leaders/politicians) cannot make nuclear bombs go away by changing the laws of nuclear warfare. On the other hand, if a coalitions of large IT companies decided to lobby for patent reform, then will probably get whatever laws they want.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
World of Warcraft uses XML for it's UI
http://www.wowwiki.com/XML_user_interface
Well thank you for pointing that out. Now we know and can proceed to retrieve monetary losses from the only two applications in the history of computing to use the XML format.
Sincerely,
John Phillips Suesalot
CEO of i4i
Its the sound of the patent system beginning to crash down. RIght now there are two choices
1) Take the fundamentally broken US system and roll it out across the world
2) Take the rest of the worlds approach that software can't be patented and roll it out to the UK
The scary thing is that even with judgements like this and the patent trolls out there we are actually seeing the likes of Microsoft push for option 1.
Patents will be the death of innovation if the system continues in this way, particularly if the US judgements are assessed at insane levels of cost. If Microsoft had known about this patent when starting the development they'd have bought the company for less than this judgement.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If it is a canadian company doing business in the US then I guess that's ok.
If the do that, could this kill the atrocity that is XML? One can only hope.
Seriously - for formatting data, it's overly complex. For storing and transmitting data, plain old config files are easier to read AND easier to parse...
What actual purpose does XML serve?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It's not going to disappear. i4i has said that certain applications that use XML (Such as Open Office) Do not infringe on their patent. Which means they didn't patent XML, they patented something to do with XML. Which Microsoft used, others do not. Thats why Microsoft is feeling the weight of this and not anyone else.
Since XML was started in '96 by the W3C, and i4i's patent was filed in '98, i4i does not own any of the rights to XML like you are saying.
Yes - Lots of places use XML. However, the chances of it disappearing are even less than the chances of HTML disappearing.
sopssa, you don't know shit. Try de-shilling and read up all the claims and exhibits - MS knew about this, and it was deliberate.
Then again, I know you won't stop being a MS shill, so fuck you.
because the people who run the patent office are fucking morons.
fitting captcha: extort
When has prior work ever stopped a patent from being issued?
That would cover ColdFusion wouldn't it?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Amen to parent. I've never quite understood what good XML brought us.
*DrugCheese rants*
What feature?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
... and Microsoft goes blind
It seems to me, though, that this covers the use of XML schemas -- at least, if they're constructed under program control.
--Greg
No they are not very narrow.
In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i.
In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned.
"Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation."
Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict.
From the patent: "The meaning of 'kword' is up to the interpreter. SGML specifies rules for insertion of tags into the content stream and how tags are to be differentiated from the content." They discuss how SMGL allows the interpreter to determine the semantics of "kword" so clearly (IMO) they acknowledge the pre-existance of the idea of separation of expression of "architecture" from the expression of content. I didn't get all the way through the application so I don't know the specifics of the manipulation they are staking claim to but by my interpretation, there is no danger to XML since XML is a direct descendant of SGML.
--Greg :-)
Sounds like Tex and LaTeX to me...
It's sort of like a binary form of XML with the tags stored separately ... so not really "normal" XML.
Still far too general and trivial to allow to be patented, once you parse "normal" XML the in memory representation will almost certainly infringe on this patent for instance (a tree structure for the markup with content stored separately is the natural implementation).
Considering SGML was 1986, you might want to think about what you're saying.
For me, it makes data semantic-free so that it can be passed between systems, and changes on the transmitting end don't fuck up the receiving end. Plus, it's readable.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
And doesn't any SGML or XML type language bear a strong semblance to Lisp S-expressions?
I'm surprised you were modded "Informative" for your assumption without any facts.
Enjoy your new home in the dinosaur graveyard.
I tend to believe these patents are often times too broad, but one of the reasons why they've stuck is due to Microsoft pushing for them to be this way. If this sticks, MSFT is looking to be, in effect, shot by their own gun. The irony is not lost on me.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Yes, just change .docx to .zip and see the magic.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
But, what's astounding to me, is in 1995 I was using SGML as a method of separating the document content from its layout. The layout wasn't kept in a separate file, but there were mechanisms to apply publishing layout to SGML based on rules. That was the whole point of SGML and its predecessor GML.
Heck, in 1995 Arbor Text had an SGML editor which could apply formatting to SGML documents for the purposes of publishing, and the company I worked for was helping people to install SGML editing and layout systems.
I'm not 100% convinced that these actually represent novel claims. They may not have been described in terms of XML, but the state of the art with SGML sure as hell was doing the whole "maintaining a document's format in a separate file" before this.
Can anyone who understands this a little more identify what specifically is required to infringe on this patent?
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
--Greg :-)
The patent in question.. Decide for yourselves.
The case involves the algorithms MS uses to open and display what they call "custom XML". It does not involve a patent on XML itself, and only affects Office 2003 and 2007, not 2010. Stop being so hysterical.
I'm sure you both don't quite understand XML then. It's about data being accessible in a tree instead of a grid. It has similar benefits to using OO programming over procedural^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w similar benefits to using highways instead of small streets to travel long distances.
I'm curious how this patient was granted given that it resembles IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) from the 1960s and the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standardized by the ISO in 1986.
To answer your curiosity, it is because existing prior art is not involved with the granting of a patent.
In other words, it doesn't matter if prior art exists or not, in order to get a patent approved.
Prior art is only used as a defense when being challenged by a patent holder.
So if it truly does count as prior art, it is fully up to Microsoft to present it at the patent case to get the patent thrown out.
That can't happen until after Microsoft is sued for patent violation, which in turn can't happen until someone files for a patent on it.
Since both of those items have come to pass, the question now is, why didn't Microsoft use that as prior art to halt the trial?
The two options that come to mind are
a) They didn't know about it, or
b) they did and tried, but the judge said it was not valid as prior art.
On one hand, being Microsoft I would be shocked if A was the case.
However, on the other hand, being Microsoft it is not too shocking.
XML is pain in the ass anyway, and I hate every time I have to use it. The format is way too complex to do little things and its processing takes way too much resources compared to the usual binary formats.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what a "writ of certiorari" is - is that a "we're too special to follow the law so please allow us to break it"?
(Yes, yes, I'm going to google it (not Bing! it...) to find out what it really is but I want to make a point before I go...)
Go over to groklaw and look up Microsoft's amici brief in Bilski and you will see MS argue for software patents.
As for patent trolling, there was the incident where MS tried to sell 22 antiLinux patents to patent trolls only to have them intercepted by the OIN.
Oh and TomTom.
I think they feel that if all else fails they can kill linux using patents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language
"GML frees document creators from specific document formatting concerns such as font specification, line spacing, and page layout required by SCRIPT/VS. Using GML, a document is marked up with tags that define what the text is, in terms of paragraphs, headers, lists, tables, and so forth."
Twenty-five freaking years before i4i's application!
Generalized markup is based on two novel postulates:
1)Markup should describe a document's structure and other attributes, rather than specify the processing to be performed on it, as descriptive markup need be done only once, and will suffice for future processing.
2)Markup should be rigorous so that the techniques available for processing rigorously-defined objects like programs and data bases, can be used for processing documents as well.
Since XML is actually definable in a profile of SGML, I wonder why Microsoft didn't just license from IBM (with whom they have a massive cross-licensing agreement) the old IBM patents and claim *that's* what they were using.
How much do you get paid by Microsoft for all this shilling/defending you do... seriously. You have quite a history of suck-up to Microsoft going on in just about every post I've read that you posted... you also tend to have a very thick distaste for open source and Linux in general... Steve Ballmer? Is that you?
What? The USPTO would beg to differ. You need to declare any prior art you are aware of [duty of disclosure] or the patent can be invalidated for inequitable conduct.
Furthermore, the patent examiner is *required* to make a search for prior art during the review process.
Please, if you're going to be a slashdot lawyer (IANAL but I play one on Slashdot), do some quick googling before posting absolutely false tripe like that.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You're not alone.
Dilbert RSS feed
XML gets people who have no business doing serialization and parsing out of that business entirely. Instead, we have schemas (either purely ad-hoc, or formalized) and common libraries to express those needs. Like any computing tool, XML has been used for good, bad, and ugly ends... but it brought the idea of schema-based document format and consistent Document Object Model (DOM) APIs to the forefront of data/document handling. In essence, this is a two-level interface: the document schema (a first-class entity, unlike an ad-hoc data format) and the programming APIs.
Even if you're no big fan of XML, the good ideas, patterns, anti-patterns, and mindset changes that spread along with it have positively influenced many other useful document technologies: JSON, YAML, the newer binary serialization formats (such as Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and Avro), and more.
Thank goodness that all of the apps I've ever been involved with date back from the old days when this was all done with SGML. That stuff is probably all out of patent (if it ever was patented) and into the public domain by now.
Have gnu, will travel.
In 1995 I designed and built (most of) the software for the following CD-ROM:
"Berg, J. van den, Duijfjes-Vellekoop, G.G.J., Kunenborg, R. & Tenback, R. (1995). Marburger Index Datenbank, ein Wegweiser zur Kunst in Deutschland (CD-ROM). Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag. " (*)
It included several internal parsers, including one for a HTML-like language that separated the content of the database from the on-screen expression. Basically, my own miniature implementation of Mozilla.
It was sold in musea throughout Germany.
I guess that should count as prior art. I'm pretty sure we could dig up the sourcecode if asked nicely.
(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I think it's more likely we'll see tort reform, which will probably make it so that only the most wealthy individuals and corporations can risk a lawsuit. Small companies like i4i will then no longer have options. If we're lucky, the tort reform will also affect patent and copyright trolls, but I'm pretty sure whatever they do to fix it will probably increase the durability of IP overall and generally punish everyone else.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
That still doesn't give it an advantage over a config file.
something=type ...
something.foo=a
something.bar=b
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
That may be true, but there are better options these days, less verbose, easier to parse, etc, like YAML.
JSON does this as well, with less filler and a similar OO construct. Also, XML doesn't provide the tree. The parser does. Any text file can be written with tree form data in mind. It doesn't need a standard to follow.
OK, I do like DOM, but the only XML I've seen that I've actually not minded, was in the IIS configuration (metabase.xml)...
It's pretty sad when it's Microsoft that "did it right".
Then again, maybe it's just because *everyone* uses it for their configuration files, which is really not a place that XML should be used IMHO.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I don't have anything against open source or Linux, in fact I use and run them as servers every day. And I think that they're far better for a server than the shit that Windows Servers are. But I'm not a zealot, so I comment according to what I see fit.
[/offtopic]
Is this the same Microsoft that just said they're all in favour of respecting others' intellectual property rights? To quote, "We respect trademarks and other people's intellectual property, and look forward to the next steps in the judicial process."
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
For me, it makes data semantic-free so that it can be passed between systems, and changes on the transmitting end don't fuck up the receiving end.
XML itself doesn't provide this for free. But what it does do is make the schema a first-class entity against which documents can be validated. This change, and the toolchains that followed, made the programmatic interface presented by the document format much more evident to onlookers. Put another way, the schema and the serialization format were no longer entangled. That, in turn, made it a whole heck of a lot easier for developers (and even some technical business types) to comprehend the patterns that allow backwards-compatible format changes.
Plus, it's readable.
Before someone flames the parent, XML being notoriously human-unfriendly in some circles, compare XML's readability to that of a random poorly-documented (endian-specific!!) binary format spun off by some dude who left the organization six years ago.
The claim is (far as I can tell) for the idea of letting the tags be variables, whose meanings reside in separate lookup table.
The IBM 1980's-era Document Composition Facility combined their SCRIPT/VS product (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT/VS) with their Generalized Markup Language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language) but also allowed the user to create and use their own set of tags (so ... the tags within a document were variables) if they supplied SCRIPT/VS with a lookup table defining the meanings of the tags.
Either the patent should not have been granted to i4i or i4i's patent claim is something other than what you think it is.
Most XML I've seen (except, sadly, the IIS metabase.xml) is a significantly bigger pain in the ass to read than a plain old config file - and even the metabase.xml file is moderately more annoying to read. It's not hard to make a config file safely transmittable either.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It's fucking metadata in a markup language for k-rist's sake. The patent is ludicrous, and whether or not the company is a troll, it only goes to show just how retarded the patent system is, and why software patents should immediately be outlawed. It's like me trying to patent CSS.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I despise Microsoft, and wish they'd been broken up and Gates and Ballmer put behind bars for what they've done, but this patent is still absurd. The concepts have been around for forty years. The patent office is full of inept halfwits, and Microsoft's big failing here is that it's too cowardly to finally put its money into wiping out software patents.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You are absolutely correct. And I like your shirt.
Microsoft already has a work-around. They've been pushing it to their partners since this morning at least:
http://oem.microsoft.com/script/contentpage.aspx?pageid=563214
It's been a while but if I remember the i4i product allows you to author data in MS Word based on a document type definition (DTD). The use of Word to do so is not new. Another small Ottawa Canada based company, Microstar Software, were first to do so with their product called Near & Far Author for Microsoft Word (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-16732008.html). This the same company that brought Near & Far view, a graphical view of SGML DTD, to market. They started working on Author around 1994-1995 time frame. I joined MIcrostar's Research Dept. in late 1995, so I can't say for sure when they started. Matt?
Author would take an SGML DTD and create a Word template that embodied the grammar defined by the DTD. This template along with a special plug-in would guide the user through the document creation process. The document's validity was verified using James Clark's SP SGML Parser Tool Kit, which was compiled into the plug-in.
Authoring was part plug-in and part Word Basic, such that when Microsoft switched to VB Script in Word 6, or there about, the product was not ported to the newer version of Word since sales were not as expected and it would have meant investing significant resources, for a small company, to make it compatible with Word 6.
Just for good measure, I still refuse to use XML in any application I design. I have no intentions of changing that any time soon either.
I get you're not planning to write a web browser. :-)
Yes, XML gets abused a lot. But I think there are applications where it makes sense. Namely those where the content is text with some markup (ever wondered what the "M" in XML stood for? :-))
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but XML is the dinosaur.
"The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well." -- Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
They will just pay the company 360 million to drop the charges.
Would it be too much to hope that Microsoft gets the message that it might be best to say goodbye to software patents (work to invalidize all of them)?
Are you serious? What kind of small company actually designs "...software...which they showed to Microsoft..." and doesn't expect
a) the ideas to be stolen by Microsoft.
b) be bought out by Microsoft.
c) be "corporate cannibalized" by Microsoft.
d) ALL OF THE ABOVE!
It has similar benefits to using OO programming over procedural
you mean bulky abstraction, awkward readability, considerable bloat and generally very very slow.
They say you should use the right tool for the job, unfortunately XML has become the only tool to use for every job. XML has its place, but only in a fraction of the places its currently used.
So, what would be the mammal successor to the XML dinosaur?
XML suffers from divergent purposes. Is XML supposed to be for markup, as implied by its name, or is it for data serialization? One of the worst parts of XML and HTML is the horrible redundancy required with closing tags. The only purpose of that redundancy was to make it easier for people to read, and it failed at that. Just adds clutter, same as adding "/* end if */" and "/* end loop */" comments to closing braces. Another bad idea was properties inside the tags. Needless complication.
YAML is way more readable, less bloated, and faster. JSON shares much with YAML. For what you're doing, I'd use YAML instead of XML.
But bad though XML is, the wistful hope that patents might kill XML is like hoping to escape cancer treatments by dying of a heart attack first. I'm pleased when any user of the patent system is hoist in their own petard, and hope they'll see the light. It would be best to cure the disease. Remove all basis for this trolling of others sweat and blood. It will be a huge step forward if Microsoft could figure out that everyone's interests, including their own, are better served if software could not be patented, and they began lobbying toward that end. I can't see MS ever joining such an effort. Instead, they hope the other guys have heart attacks, and even help them along a little, trying to manipulate their diets. Such a small minded approach to a big problem! Unworthy of a major business, but sadly, we see it all the time. Par for the course with the horrible leadership that infests our corporations.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Would it be too much to hope that Microsoft gets the message that it might be best to say goodbye to software patents (work to invalidize all of them)?
But.. But.. But... Microsoft PROTECTS intellectual property.. It is obviously protecting i4i's intellectual property from it's self. Biter bit. Not that they are going to learn unless it really damages them.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
haha this makes me laugh. I hate word and think they should stop selling it. It sucks and I hate going to a school with such a horrible word processor. I prefer my OpenOffice
Indeed. It's probably the most widely misused software concept ever.
Except for really large complicated programs, I just don't see any reason to use XML files to describe program configurations. It's retarded.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
From what I have read, this patent is a solution to a very specific problem, one that had been plaguing MS for a long time. MS met with i4i to talk about licensing, then didn't licence it, then (as the court has determined) put the patented solution into MS Word anyway.
Quite frankly, i don't see the major point here being either prior art or whether or not software patents should exist.
The main point I see is that MS has been one of the major proponents of software patents, indeed trying to cram them down the rest of the world's throats. When the little guy develops a software patent that they need, do they play by their own rules?
Well the point of XML isnt that its pretty, or efficient...
The point was to standardize this simple functionality in a generalized manner, and like most generalized standards, it fucking sucks to work.
You dont bother looking at XML specs when working with XML, because the XML format is the easy part. Its because every application has their own, and fully expects, their own specialized markups. If you MUST read format specs anyways then why not use a format that isnt so fucking general?
"His name was James Damore."
a) the ideas to be stolen by Microsoft.
Profit! ($290M)
b) be bought out by Microsoft.
Profit!
c) be "corporate cannibalized" by Microsoft.
Profit?
d) ALL OF THE ABOVE!
Profit!?
And don't S-expressions bear a strong resemblance to Church's lambda calculus?
Bah, it's so broad it probably covers cold fusion!!!
Likewise, I also despise Microsoft and their rotten practices stretching back decades, but i4i is a blatent, disgusting patent troll of the worst kind - seriously, it turns my stomach - i4i are the lowest of the lowest bottom-feeding scum of this planet. This is not a real 'invention', it's basically an obvious consequence of XML-based data editing and has doubtless been 're-invented' loads of times ... this patent will have a serious chilling effect on the entire XML software world, and will limit the usefulness and adoption of XML, if it isn't already, while the so-called "inventors" rake in truckloads of cash for their bogus patent. I have more respect for a common street thief than a patent troll, because at least the former isn't pretending to be doing something legitimate.
They say you should use the right tool for the job, unfortunately XML has become the only tool to use for every job. XML has its place, but only in a fraction of the places its currently used.
+1 wholeheartedly agree. XML is very flexible, but the flexibility comes at a price. XML is not efficient for "grid" data. Compounding the problem, there are those for whom:
isn't inefficient enough, so they insist on a format like:
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
As far as I can remember this was right after 9/11 and the US government needed help to parse a lot of text better. i4i was more or less strong-armed into co-operating with Microsoft for National Security Reasons.
It IS a poster case for the upside of patents. It's not as if Microsoft's RD department came up exactly with the same product without a demo of the patented technology beforehand. It's apparent that MS was demo'd the technology, told the small company to piss off in regards to their license, and then reversed engineered it. This isn't the first time this has happened to MS (Java anyone?). This is the type of thing that irritates me the most. I personally feel that the software patent system is flawed, but then MS goes and does s*%t like this and proponents of the flawed system (trolls and patent attorneys) say "See look the big company is squashing the little guy and the system works". No it doesn't most of the time, but in this case it sure did.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
The cute and fuzzy JSON. Smaller, faster, lighter.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No, like the Borgs, they're not working with: they're assimilating.
What exactly is the non-obvious part of the patent in this?
Let me be the first to welcome you to the United States of America. You can pick up your common sense on the way out. Enjoy your stay.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I've had patent lawyers tell me specifically to never do web searches for something I am working on, specifically because you are required to disclose any prior art you are aware of. If you aren't aware of the prior work, and your patent is the first patent on that work, it will stand in court.
In addition, instead of violating someone else's patent (like the last two instances in under two weeks of violating someone's copyrights by stealing code), they could have just hmmm... this is a tough one....
OH! I remember... they could have just licensed the patent/code/whatever like numerous other companies do in similar situations. So, I dont feel bad about this happening to them. They've done the steal/"borrow" code and ideas thing numerous times in the past...
My only worry is that they get this overturned because of the "economic harm" or some other nonsense - or run this company out of business with the cost of appeals until a settlement is reached. It's high time they are found guilty of (and punished for) such crimes.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
If I remember correctly the full history of this suite, at start office licenced the technology for a very specific product, then they play the we're microsoft card and started using i4i technology within every other products, tramping the first licence. i4i sued, won, ms attaked i4i licence claims and i4i resorted to their patents on that tecnology to fight back.
so no ms fanboy, i4i is not trolling.
Microsoft released a new Update yesterday to take care of the infringement already.:)
Microsoft Releases 2007 Office Supplement .docx, .docm, or .xml files. The files will open, but any Custom XML elements will be removed. http://oem.microsoft.com/script/contentpage.aspx?pageid=563214
A new supplement for the 2007 Microsoft Office system is required for the United States. After the supplement is installed, Microsoft Office Word will no longer read Custom XML elements contained within
[...]It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista,[...]
Microsoft: Oh dear, we're shirking our duties! Allow us to break that for you?
$ make available
Which CSS?
$ make available
For instance, i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Symphony etc. infringe their patent.
Well, it couldn't be because there's absolutely no money to be had in making those claims, right?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Incidentally, nobody is behind mentioned applications that do not infringe "the patent", to pay for infringement.
It's one thing to abuse a standards body (not to mention the English language) in order to call your proprietary crap a "standard", but it's another thing to get people to adopt your crappy so-called standard.
Of course, MS doesn't really care if anybody else adopts the standard or not - so long as they can use the words "ISO standard" in their advertising.
The point is, I can be okay with there being an OOXML "standard" as long as nobody else besides MS ends up using OOXML, and as long as the ISO committee isn't totally and permanently ruined as a result of having been used like a sock puppet by MS.
Of course, the ISO committee needs to at least stand up and put a stop to that "drafting errors" nonsense, but hopefully if they did that they could at least continue on with some amount of credibility intact.
Apropos that i4i gets eye for an eye from none other than Microsoft.
The cute and fuzzy JSON. Smaller, faster, lighter.
Do you seriously propose to use JSON for text markup (where, in XML, most of document is text, and tags are interspersed far between)?
Not every use case is perfect for XML, but some actually are - it's an eXtensible Markup Language, after all.
That said, even for short configs, XML isn't all that bad. Granted, it's pretty verbose, but the advantage of using XML is that every framework today has an XML parser as part of its base class/function library. This is still not so for JSON.
The patent is not specific to XML. It's actually hilarious that MS has not brought up that their Word format circa 1991 actually used exactly the type of mapping claimed in the invention (no XML there). The real difference i4i proposes might be storing the raw data and the format map into separate files, but even that is unclear on their patent.
Amen to parent. I've never quite understood what good XML brought us.
A bad standard is better than no standard.
That may be true, but there are better options these days, less verbose, easier to parse, etc, like YAML.
The problem is, there's YAML, and there's JSON, and there are S-expressions, and a dozen other ad-hoc formats; and no-one can agree on which one of the "better" formats to use as the data exchange format.
Consequently, there is no single standard JSON or YAML or ... parser in Java libraries, or in Qt - you need to get a third-party one (and to do so, you need to pick one of the umpteenth alternatives for your platform).
Meanwhile, with XML: any language and any platform today has at least a basic parser as a standard component, so there's no need to pick, and no extra dependencies (pure ISO C/C++ being an exception, but people rarely code in that; otherwise, there is a "standard" XML parser in Win32, there's one in Qt, there's one in GNOME, etc). There's rich tooling available - for example, you can write an XSD or RELAX NG schema, and any of dozen editors and IDEs (including Emacs) can use it to drive code completion. You can trivially process and combine heterogeneous XML data using XSLT. And so on.
Yes, the format is far from perfect. Some things are inconsistent, some (e.g. DTDs) are effectively deprecated but still have to be supported, some are overly complicated. XML Schema in particular is an overengineered mess (but gladly we have RELAX NG). But overall, for all its flaws, it still does the job, and the interoperability benefits of everyone using it are worth the minor pain.
No they are not very narrow.
In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i.
In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned.
"Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation."
Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict.
Yet what is entirely missing (and this is the #1 problem with IP patent law right now), is that they never specified their format. This is the equivelant to someone saying "Hey, back before Henry Ford invented the Model T., we came up with the idea that you could transport people and things in vehicles that didn't rely on horses or people for power!! So you owe us big time."
It's total BS the way the system is setup. If they developed a format, then sure give them a patent for the FORMAT they developed. But you don't get to just say "Hey, I'm patenting this idea which I never actually implemented". The entire point of patents is so that someone can't rip off your EXACT invention... but they CAN alter it in a "significant" fashion even if the resulting device does the same damn thing. Well, that's in the real world anyhow. Congress needs to get their collective heads out of their asses and fix this shit, right now, before this gets worse. It isn't that difficult: Require source code and/or executable, the equivelant of blueprints/working models, and if someone makes significant alteration to the code then it isn't covered. For example, imagine if some asshat had "patented" the idea of using pixels to display a 3-D virtual world, and got it, without having to be more specific or submit and code, etc. This is effectively what this company is trying to do.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
Do you seriously propose to use JSON for text markup
I propose to use JSON in all ajax-style applications instead of XML. It's superior in nearly every way. You'd be surprised how many ready-made parsers there are at json.org.
where, in XML, most of document is text, and tags are interspersed far between
That's not necessarily true... look at the content-to-metadata ratio here, for example:
<?xml version="1.0"?> /> ... versus this:
<manifest identifier="manifest1" version="1.2"
xmlns="http://www.imsproject.org/xsd/imscp_rootv1p1p2"
xmlns:adlcp="http://www.adlnet.org/xsd/adlcp_rootv1p2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.imsproject.org/xsd/imscp_rootv1p1p2 imscp_rootv1p1p2.xsd
http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_rootv1p2p1 imsmd_rootv1p2p1.xsd
http://www.adlnet.org/xsd/adlcp_rootv1p2 adlcp_rootv1p2.xsd">
<organizations default="org1">
<organization identifier="org1">
<title>Course Title</title>
<item identifier="item1" identifierref="resource1" isvisible="true">
<title>Course Title</title>
</item>
<metadata>
<schema>ADL SCORM</schema>
<schemaversion>1.2</schemaversion>
</metadata>
</organization>
</organizations>
<resources>
<resource identifier="resource1" type="webcontent" href="launch.html" adlcp:scormtype="sco">
<file href="launch.html"
</resource>
</resources>
</manifest>
{
default_org:"org1",
organizations: [
{
identifier:"org1",
title:"Course Title",
items: [
identifier:"item1",
identifierref:"resource1",
isvisible:"true",
title:"Course Title"
],
metadata: {
schema:"ADL SCORM",
schemaversion:"1.2"
}
}
],
resources: [
{
identifier:"resource1",
type:"webcontent",
href:"launch.html",
adlcp_scormtype:"sco",
files: [
{
href:"launch.html"
}
]
}
]
}
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
(BTW checking this took a huge effort, and big searching and I'm still not sure it's the whole truth. It's astounding how much of the media, both "main stream" and alternative/blog is covering this whilst trying to pretend that i4i never did anything useful at all.)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I propose to use JSON in all ajax-style applications instead of XML.
I can agree for that particular use case.
It's superior in nearly every way.
Depends on the usage. See below.
You'd be surprised how many ready-made parsers there are at json.org.
So, how do I pick the best one (or at least the "good enough" one) to use? The one that I can trust to be fully compliant, and that will be kept maintained and ported to new language/framework versions? Let's say, I need one for C++.
That's not necessarily true...
You misunderstand me. What I meant is that there are kinds of XML documents in which tags take up the minority of the content, and the majority is text. XHTML is a classic example; DocBook is another one. Essentially any scenario in which the basis is text, and the tags are markup on that text. Your SCORM example (that brings back some very unpleasant memories, by the way - I had to deal with this cursed thing) is about as far from it as it can get.
Now, for text markup, you can still represent it as JSON (after all, it's still a tree) - but just imagine how messy even a simple XHTML example would look that way.
Oh, by the way - JSON sample code in your post isn't actually JSON. In particular, you need to quote all keys, i.e. rather than:
identifier: "resource1"
you have to write:
"identifier": "resource1"
The only unquoted JSON identifiers are literals "true", "false", and "null". See RFC 4627 for reference (though the grammar on http://json.org/ also covers this).
Then the rest of the world can go ahead and leave you behind.
Amazingly short sighted and just way off target.
Because there weren't tree formats before XML...
News coverage of technical things is so effing horrible. Most tech articles are written by people who don't understand programming but don't see why that should stop them from broadcasting their misinterpretation of technical information. You should just read the patent; most of it is very clearly-written.
Filed in 1994, it does predate XML. It doesn't predate SGML, though, and since core XML is essentially the same thing, it's probably safe. However, I it does affect XML-based standards -- specifically the ones that separate content from structure/presentation.
The Patent
It's a way to separate content from structure. So, for example, where and SGML document would store data like "<p>Hi <i>friend</i></p>", they store it as two separate pieces of data. The content piece would be "Hi friend", the structure piece would be "0:p, 3:i, 9:/i, 9:/p" (roughly). So now if you wanted to format that document differently, you could just use a different structure piece; the content piece doesn't change.
This exact technique obvious, so I don't think it should have been awarded a patent. But maybe what's obvious to us in 2009 may not have been obvious to the patent examiner in 1994 and, in any case, it doesn't look like any of the affected parties are going to try and argue obviousness. The important question is how generally will their technique be interpreted?
Taken narrowly, it's a way of putting XML-like tags in a separate file, mapping them back into the content using byte offsets. This is easy enough to work around. Taken broadly, it's a way of separating content from structure. So, any time you augment the content in one file by some kind of annotations in another, you're violating their patent. So HTML and CSS are problematic because the style information is in a separate file, even though the mapping is done using tag and class names and not using byte offsets.
I don't know much about patent litigation, so I don't know how much leeway they give plaintiffs. But I doubt Microsoft Word uses their exact technique; they probably do something similar to HTML+CSS or XSLT. So this victory could indicate that the courts are interpreting the technique broadly. Which sucks. Man, patents like this are killing the industry.
why not use LaTeX?
Well, "readable"... I loathe reading XML in a text editor if it's above a few lines. And I have had to work with both XML-based and binary data formats for importing data: I'd take a well-documented binary format every day.
xslt
That summary makes it sound as though the company invented DTDs, after seeing HTML (which had them, sort-of), and in ignorance of all of the processing that was already being done in SGML in the years before. This is clearly rubbish. The pre-existence of document formatting with SGML must make the patent's claims very narrow. (not that I've read them.)
-- Andrew
An i4i, a tooth for a tooth.
Since when does DTD or CSS file creation involve "a map of metacodes found in the document" such that "the map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document". I doubt that is what Microsoft have done, because, well, who would? It means that this map needs to be regenerated after every edit of the document, which means that this isn't terribly useful or document-independent meta-information...
-- Andrew
That's some might fine rewriting of history. When Microsoft was selling OOXML to ISO, Microsoft played up the custom XML feature as the biggest innovation since angle brackets. Whenever someone suggested they just use ODF, Microsoft would argue that ODF lacked custom XML support and that this feature was valuable and essential for business process integration. They trotted out business partner after business partner saying how important custom XML was. Now it is dismissed as a little used, obscure feature. Very interesting. So, was OOXML sold to ISO on a fraudulent premise? And btw, "custom XML" is mentioned over 1,000 times in the OOXML specification. Further, note that Microsoft's solution for "fixing" Word is to have it strip custom XML from DOCX files when reading it. So how can you say that the patent has nothing to do with OOXML if the remedy to work around the patent involves removing custom XML from the OOXML documents?
1897, but then that A.Einstein quit and got a real job.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.
Oh THAT must be why M$ didn't want to license the code from i4i - it would have been more stable than their OS, so it would have made them look bad. Perhaps they can get their group of crack programmers [or is that crack-smoking programmers?] to make it less stable - thus making it eligible for inclusion in their kludgy OS.
All this doesn't make a whole lot of since to me.Why in gods good name would MS after being told of the patent,offered a licensing deal,say no and implement it anyways??? If i were a stock holder, i wouldn't be to happy and maybe a suit could be brought up against MS for purposely loosing billions in dollars. Someones on a serious power trip thats for sure and wasting stock holders money too.
Jack of all trades,master of none
If this patent is as specific as half the people in this thread state, could such a tiny feature have damaged i4i/gained Microsoft $296,000,000? I know nothing of patent law or XML, but a minor change being worth $296M sounds a bit extreme. Even if the damages were awarded to make an example of MS, I can't imagine either company benefitting 1/10th of that.
The patent office is full of inept halfwits
It wouldn't matter if the patent office was full of Einsteins, it's the patent office itself that is the problem. Patents need to go away.
An XML file is a nice way to store data as a human readable data base format. Of course you can try to do that in a config file, but it would be like hammering screws in.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
XML is very useful for configuration files:
- All programming languages have parsers for it.
- Since it is so standard, most other programs can read it.
- These parsers can almost always do basic error checking by creating a DTD (file which contains all XML tags in the config file?)
- The config file can be upgraded (to the next version) using XSLT, no need to write a custom upgrade program
- It is very easy to extend a parameter on the XML config file, for instance from a single value to an array of values
Unlike you I don't despise M$ & I don't think Ballmer & Gates should be imprisoned. Only kidding! LOL! Your main point is kind of humorous in itself because I'm damn sure everything M$ has ever written was based on a reverse-engineering job. I'm sure the reason they never really took on Linux in the courts is because there's a lot of UNIX code embedded in their source. To sue would mean they would have to come clean with their code. They wouldn't be able to just bring one or two thousand lines that match, they'd have to bring the context as well & that would be their undoing. They would be busted on the UNIX thefts. UNIX would have a field day for many years to come tearing at M$'s software. The Gov't would attempt to stop this but even they can't stop a High Court challenge. If any of that code was open-source then their code would be worthless as it would immediately have to be released as open-source & it would be sent a billion times around the web. It would be their end. How sad!
Couldn't agree more. While XML is just crappy, but bearable as a document description language, it is an utter failure as a data description language. It ain't really human-readable and it's machine readable with just a lot of effort.
Whether this push for ever more complex XML-based thingies has method or is just aimless madness, the effect is the same: the decommoditizing of our basic constructs.
When will I need XSLT to just make sense of my /etc/passwd?
Just compare the sizes of the XML library on your computer with the size of an interpreter, compiler or any other program in this category (and this other program is most probably doing something useful!)
My favourite comparison is
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 151308 2009-12-13 23:05 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2 /usr/lib/liblua5.1.so.0.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 147700 2008-01-26 17:36
And in Lua you get a bytecode interpreter, a proper garbage collector and a decent runtime library for free.
XML is a denial of service attack on us.
In no way does it seem to me i4i matches a patent troll. I agree that the idea that someone can own such a trivial idea is dumb, but the patent is not "obvious" just because there are so many stupid different variants you could do which would achive the same thing differently. This is not something wrong in the patent system. This is the patent system working exactly as it is designed. If you don't like this, then you should be campaigning to get rid of software patents.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
...do they play by their own rules?
ALWAYS! Or didn't make the sentence "Microsoft 'always respect[s] trademarks and other people's intellectual property...'" from the "Microsoft Sued Over Bing Trademark" story make you laugh out loud?
Just for good measure, I still refuse to use XML in any application I design. I have no intentions of changing that any time soon either.
If you insist on XML for exchanging information, you have greatly decreased stupid, ignorant Windows programmers' chances to mess it up.
I hope that is not the reason why you refuse to use XML.
This was around the time that Microsoft was being tried and convicted on anti trust grounds in the U.S. and supposedly was reforming into a "kinder gentler" Microsoft that didn't resemble the black widow spider any more.
Oracle could be sued over OpenOffice.org and its closed brother Star Office. Are you saying Oracle doesn't have any money?
I just poked through the patent and AFAICT---an acronym all us non-lawyers seem to be falling back on---here's what they patented:
1. You make one file in an unstructured/poorly-structured format.
2. You make an overlay of that file that indicates where markup would have gone, if the format weren't totally braindead.
3. But it is braindead, so you can't get the markup from the file, or leave it there. Instead, you create a map file, which maps content from the separate document file into a markup file.
Because XML is itself processed to create a visual layout (via XSLT)---rather than having the visual layout created separately and then just linked with the XML---this process doesn't cover that. I'm guessing that all the "custom xml" stuff in office was stored in a separate file or in a separate portion of the file, and that's why it infringed.
What's disturbing is that, although this doesn't seem to cover anything widely in use by anybody, it is extremely general. What is patented is basically just any mapped (vs. inline) text structure, and a way to transform mapped structure to inline structure. One might say that this is something like if someone had patented reverse-polish notation. Sure, everybody uses the normal algebraic notation, but what happens when a stack-based machine is invented, and reverse-polish notation suddenly makes a lot of sense?
Not THE judge. This has gone through the trial and 2 appeals so it is at least 3 judges now.
(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista
Excluding XP x64 and Vista x64 of course. As it runs on 3.11 it must be 16-bit, and Windows x64 won't run 16-bit software. On the upside, it probably runs on 32-bit Windows 7 too.
Yes, the patent's claims are very narrow - and the patent has nothing to do with XML at all.
In order to infringe, you have to have to totally seperate the formatting information from the text - as in, a chunk of data containing all the formatting formatting, and an entirely seperate chunk of data containing all the text. (Normal XML/SGML document formats have formatting codes intermingled with the text, which is explicitly not covered by the patent.)
In addition, the formatting information must reference the text to which it applies by location. That's why CSS and most other XML/SGML stylesheet systems don't infringe - they apply formatting information based on tag names, IDs, classes, etc.
That's kindof what I think about XML.
And if human readable is your is your goal, extend that analogy to using a fresh loaf of bread as your screws.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The patent was GRANTED in 98 but filed in 94.
It seems that you haven't really used XML. I used it for vehicle telematics - data transfer from a central data base to the truck board computers. It was more human-readable than sending SQL queries, you could make those XMLs by hand very fast to test something, you could see very fast whether the transmission was ok or fucked up, and even when you don't have the specs you can easily guess what the data means and where it belongs. Also because of the tree format it was easy to move the different types of data where it belongs, even in a combined XML with several different data trees.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
They denied my idea of round device designed to help support the weight of hulling gardening material around. Said the wheel barrow and even the wheel was prior art. Tim S.
"wish they'd been broken up and Gates and Ballmer put behind bars for what they've done"
Uhhh... ummm... what have they done?
HOWEVER, the patent examiner is required to search for prior art. Whether or not they do so assiduously is a different story...
Are you sure about that? Really, really sure? Are are you stating some wishful thinking as truth?
Several patents have been invalidated via demonstration of prior art after the patent was issued. See In re Peterson (2003) for an example.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"in order to use patents as weapons."
I wish I had the balls to make random baseless claims. Clearly you must have seen the future being a wizard and all...
Well then, you shouldn't have let Microsoft's company nurse cut them off just so you could post here. If you're dishonest enough to shill for Bill, take it a step further and just tell him you're shilling and take the money and stop posting here. It saves you work and save our time. If you're shilling for ideological reasons and not getting compensated then maybe it's time to take up a more socially redeeming hobby than shilling.
Microsoft has using software patents offensively for years. The suit over FAT and the suit against TomTom are just two examples from this year. A quick trip to Google will show you more from this year and many other years. If not Google, then Cuil.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't use it because it's extremely verbose and programming it is a lot more work than plain human readable text files. The types of applications I develop have no need for XML, and the types where it might be applicable won't work well with XML.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
So, how do I pick the best one (or at least the "good enough" one) to use? The one that I can trust to be fully compliant, and that will be kept maintained and ported to new language/framework versions? Let's say, I need one for C++.
JSON is pretty simple, there aren't going to be a lot of major changes to it. This one gets good ratings, and you know it must be good because it's open source:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsoncpp/
You misunderstand me. What I meant is that there are kinds of XML documents in which tags take up the minority of the content, and the majority is text. XHTML is a classic example;
I'm not suggesting JSON as a replacement for text markup, I'm suggesting it as a replacement for data exchange. For that matter, I also wouldn't suggest XML as a replacement for HTML 4, I don't see any problems that HTML 4 has which can be solved by using XML. I just used a SCORM example because that's been the majority of my experience using XML, that was the file I had handy. For representing any document structure I would still be inclined to target the current version of HTML, that's been working fine for years.
you need to quote all keys
Right, my mistake. I typically don't write JSON by hand, it usually gets generated automatically from a native data structure. But, when I write object literals in Javascript the property identifiers don't need to be quoted.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
win32s?
I'm (fairly) sure you don't quite understand XML either, then. It's not about data being accessible in a tree instead of a grid. It's about data being storable/modifiable in a well-defined format that could be agreed to by all users of the format (being based on SGML), that is also human readable (being text-based and not binary encoded), and that can represent the greatest number of data structures (grids, lists, etc. being simpler structures than trees). It has similar benefits to using .NET over each language having its own framework (every application isn't forced to write its own plumping over again). Similar benefits to traffic lights having red lights that mean stop, yellow lights that mean prepare to stop (or go faster in some states), and green lights that mean go (a common convention that you can follow anywhere).
The fact that so many intelligent people (not that I'm assuming I'm one of them) can see XML as having such intrinsically different purposes is probably a sign of how poorly it's understand and that perhaps it won't be long before something better comes along. Or rather, different, since JSON is probably "that thing" and I doubt many would call JSON "more elegant" than XML, just easier to use, which is why it will win.
In fact, I'm sure someone will correct me and tell me why I don't understand XML.
Except for the fact that the patent is absurd. If I use a separate stylesheet file coupled with HTML, I am effectively violating this patent.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've also found this to be a fascinating debate, full of lack of information and misinformation. It's been surprisingly hard to find a "satisfying level of truth". Most reports of the case seem to imply that the issue is simply Word's use of XML as a whole and that i4i is claiming to own the XML format. So, I actually read TFA. Then the actual TFA in the TFA. Then the actual Complaint in the TFA. Which includes the actual patent.
Now, after reading that, I felt I couldn't possibly be fully informed still, since the patent seems to be for the storing and processing of structure seperate from its content. A map of the structure points to the locations of the content. XML certainly doesn't work that way. There were hints about the little-used feature affected referred to as custom XML. I knew that couldn't truly be a generic sense of custom XML. All XML is custom. That's the whole point of XML.
So the feature in question is the attaching of XML Schema to a document. Now, to me that sounds suspiciously like XSLT, but I have to assume it's different in implementation. I assume the issue i4i has is with the implementation of the mapping of the "custom" XML schema elements to the content elements in the document.
Which I have to admit, might almost be valid. This does feel like a fairly broad patent to me, but IANAPL. I also wonder if there is truly prior art on this. While an obvious concept in retrospect, how many document format did seperate their formatting from their structure? The issue seems to clearly not be a simple matter of editing XML or other formats.
Also in reading the details of that patent, one could argue that the CSS standard also applies (separating content from layout). RFC 2318, describing CSS, was written early enough to constitute prior art.
However, IANAL and I have to assume that Microsoft's legal team probably investigated this possibility and ruled it out for some reason.
No; because a) you would be doing it with HTML not XML and b) because your style sheet would be formatting, not structure (presentation not semantic). These differences mean that you wouldn't match the patent. Note that the patent cites prior art doing more or less similar things with SGML. Now, it might seem stupid to you (and it does to me) that specifically choosing a new combination of things that nobody in particular thought of before, but which "anyone" could think of if they set out to list different cobinations then writing a document gets you a monopoly, but that is exactly how patents work and more or less what they are for. You might think this patent is "obvious", but that is because you have a different definition of the word obvious from the one used by patent lawyers.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Nowadays one would do that in Haskell, which automatically guarantees some of those properties. So I kinda agree.
If I ever have to be connected to a heart-lung machine, I want its software to be written in pure Haskell.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.