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MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
Groklaw has it.
It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents; even when they lose in that arena (and they are serial infringers, frequently losing such cases) - they have already made a huge profit on the whole dirty business. Same old Microsoft.
The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
you had me at #!
That's utopian thinking. For home use, I more or less agree with you. Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.