I wonder how much involved M$ really were when the final XML technicalrecommendation was finally released...

[Carsten Klein <carstenklein@yahoo.de>]

Hi everyone,

as being a quiet observer for a while, I have recognized that  M$ is 
trying to get a hold on to some very vital,
publicly accessible and supposedly free to all technologies by issuing 
patents on key technologies, like
for example SOAP that which is based on XML and, lately, even on XML 
encapsulated scripting languages.
The latter, by any chance, refers to their HTA, a definition that is far 
from ever being pre-alpha, in my
eyes, not even requiring CDATA tags - how mediocre and far from being 
platform independent.
However, they have managed to get a patent on this, along with patents 
on COOKIES storing ids
that refer to a session and to a specific user owning that session, 
possibly even holding up everyone using
this technology in the US and beyond. However, I wasn't able to track 
down any prior art, maybe you
are able to provide some? And, I still can't believe that they have 
figured it out prior to 1999, with their claims being
dating back to late 1995 (August or September, I don't rembember).

Then, they were involved with the "invention" of the SOAP. However, I do 
believe that IBM and others were key to
this invention, still, how could they claim patents on the technologies 
that were used by so much people
at that time and are still going to be used (Apache SOAP / AXIS). I'm 
referring to the patent that M$ helds on ...net and
SOAP and distributed (multi-tier) services relying on SOAP message 
exchange and routing, something that is
very vital to future technologies and possibly inventions.

I, for one, personally think that either Bill kissed someone's ass at 
the local US authority patents office or that,
possibly, the patenting system and offices are mediocre and therefore 
have to be replaced by people who
are capable of thinking more globally (not in just terms of american 
five or ten mile borders) and that are capable of grasping
and capture the inclination of such vital patents and technologies to 
even never ever permit them to be
outspoken or even granted.

As such, I'm a firm believer in that software patents are for bad and 
that they never ever should be taken
into consideration. However, I'm not a resident of the U.S. and for 
sure, will never be. Thus, it is up to you
to take position and deliver more prior act evidence to the patents 
offices, even the publicly available w3c open-sourced
reference implementations would do. And if that is not enough, you will 
have also to deliver more capable people to
discover such fraughts from either company when signing in so-called 
patents.

However, we, in the EU will have to be even more sensible to what is now 
happening, since M$ ( and for sure other software companies)
was successful of issuing a patent on their "very ingenious" M$ Office 
documents. How ingenious I say, since OpenOffice has already
used this type of document storage and definition all along and that M$ 
should be enabled to use mediocre patenting laws to protect their,
subsequently mediocre "invention" to force adopters to pay licensing 
fees to what is more or less an open architecture,
will not get into my mind. Then, therefore, we too, in the EU will have 
to keep open minds and globally thinking as our main goal.
However, I'm not in a position of how to tell the patent granting 
authorities what to do and what not.

The key position is, they ( the EU and therfore their patenting offices) 
are looking on the old U.S. to finally grant such patents or not.
Not in the case of XML based notation and structuring and styling of 
office documents, this is clearly a fault of ours and of australian 
patenting authorities.

However, I urge you to be even more sensible on software patents, as the 
great parasite of software development, as M$ is, will
try to capture every single invention that was devised by third parties 
as one of their own, be it either naming (MUI for for example, which was 
invented way
back by a single person here in good old Germany regarding C++ based, 
adoptable user interfaces, that of whose name they used for simply 
something else,
trying to obscure the original meaning, for sure) or any, non-existing 
now technology.

I wonder if you Americans will ever wake up and finally be able to 
understand the great old lie. Do something! Wake up and oppose!


Thanks for listening and thanks for keeping up and them down.

Best regards,

Carsten