[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
If you mean the implementation, you may be right.
If you mean the surface characteristics of rich UI
markup languages, read on.
I think that one will look inside the system and find
lots of prior art. The patents they vaguely refer to
may or may not exist. They are using the license to
FUD the market because they know the schemas will
get into the public anyway so they are pre-empting.
OpenOffice scares them. That's good. It should.
When MS indemnifies as HP and SUN have, I'll take
their licensing more seriously. Otherwise, take
exception to it when you contract with them and
let them deal with changing it or losing the sale.
If all one looks at is XAML, there is too much
publically documented prior art that precedes both
it and XUL. Smart players should acknowledge that
quickly and publically before the perception builds
that this language originates from the web. Otherwise,
they face yetAnotherMisinformedJudge.
If they attempt to patent the Longhorn UI, they
will lose their business. That would be an incredible
blunder on the same scale for them as Netscape
ignoring XML was for Netscape. If they have any
business brains in Redmond, they will find a means
to standardize royalty-free and time that to be
approved just as Longhorn is being released.
If they can find something beneath the UI to patent,
that will be interesting, but the best course of
action for their competition is to get a standard
ready before Longhorn is fielded. MS would be smart
to help do that. Avoid the courts this time and take
notice that the emnity toward MS is building at every
level of society. At some point, the different scales
of that will connect and cascade. How to dampen that
should be a question of some concern for Balmer; or
otherwise he is leading with his ego instead of his
excellent business sense.
I also suspect patent protection as a FUD strategy
is going to lose steam sooner than later. It is
mucking with the economy and that is a nice election
talking piece for the Democrats.
**Standard service-oriented architectures should not
care what or who is picking up the SOAP.**
len
-----Original Message-----
From: james anderson [mailto:james.anderson@setf.de]
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 5:01 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Word 2003 schemas available
it's like .net .
microsoft has (or intends to) patent the particular terms and relations
specified in their schemas in so far as they are used as a "mechanism"
to annotate documents.
they are not the "can-opener". they are the mechanism used to
manufacture the can-opener.
one can be sure they will do the same with their longhorn ui
description mechanism. i'm curious if their licensing terms for that
will be as amenable to third party development.
len, your turn.
|
