Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Patent Madness. A lot of news today about the famous ActiveX patent (aka the Eolas plug-in patent) which has led to Microsoft threatening to alter the web as we know it. Not only did Tim Berners Lee claim that early HTML drafts qualified as prior art, but much closer to home f(or me,) Ray Ozzie a little while ago did some amazing software archeology and demonstrated prior art by running a really old copy of Lotus Notes. I am not against patents for software, but I do think that they have been abused more and more. And as a developer of software, I have no idea at all how I am supposed to avoid infringing on one of the near-infinite number of software patents out there. I also don't know of a single software developer who tries to. 9:53:45 PM  >  trackback []   comment []