Patent loss creates pro-Microsoft alliances
Published: 26 Sep 2003 10:25 BST
"If he has some altruistic motives here, I think it's time to step forward and describe them in more detail," one technologist for an IE competitor said. "Instead, his lawyers have said that everyone in the browser business should talk to them about getting a licence. Maybe something good can come of this, but all in all, it's a very frustrating way to be saved."
Doyle counters that he wants only to correct Microsoft's misdeeds and liberate the masses from the oppression of Bill Gates' vast empire. "We, because of this legal victory, will be able to reinstate a whole new area for competitive development in the software industry. The developers and the competing entities out there to Microsoft, I think, will come to find that we are more of a friend than a threat," he said.
Microsoft might still pull out a victory at the appellate level. Moreover, even if Eolas' patent is upheld, the rest of the software industry may very well go with Microsoft's workarounds rather than face the prospect of abandoning development for the universally distributed IE.
Filed in 1999, the Eolas case drew international attention last month, when a US District Court ruled that Microsoft's IE browser violated Eolas' Patent No. 5,838,906. The patent, filed on 17 October, 1994, and granted 17 November, 1998, covers a system that launches an application within a Web page.
The jury found that IE infringed on the patent through its inclusion of Microsoft's ActiveX technology, which Web authors use to launch and run plug-in applications such as Java applets, Adobe Acrobat documents and Macromedia Flash movies. Without ActiveX, the Microsoft browser would be unable to fully render a significant proportion of pages on the Web as well as on many corporate intranets.
This is why Doyle says his suit, if successful, will right many wrongs Microsoft inflicted in crushing upstart browser rival Netscape Communications. When Netscape launched in 1994, its founders saw the Web browser as a potential end run around the Windows juggernaut. Rather than having to code applications to work with Windows, the computing world could write to the open standard of the Web, Netscape and its investors reasoned -- and the operating system would therefore be reduced to a mere commodity from a multibillion-dollar, Microsoft-controlled toll booth.
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