Eolas Wins Second Round Against Microsoft, Goes After Linux Too
from the ugh dept
Despite what seemed like stacks and stacks of prior art concerning the Eolas patent (and the fact that the USPTO has agreed to review the patent), a judge has now ruled that, indeed, Microsoft violated the Eolas patent, which describes the idea of "plugins" for a browser. The judge also ordered Microsoft to stop offering an infringing browser - but immediately put that on hold knowing that Microsoft would be appealing the ruling (as they should!). This is a patent that never should have been granted, as it's an idea that is far from "non-obvious". Meanwhile, Eolas is also talking to the Linux community about licensing the patent as well. In that second article, the guy from Eolas talks about what a big supporter of open source technology he is, which doesn't necessarily make sense when he's holding onto a big software patent at the same time.
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Whew!
Mozilla
FreeBSD
Because, well, Mozilla can run on Mac OS X, Windows and FreeBSD.
And, well, FreeBSD isn't Linux.
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No Subject Given
They could give out a free patent license to everybody *but* Microsoft.
And it would be about as welcome as giving an avid bird lover a well-preserved bird you shot for them.
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eolas
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Poetic justice...
Armed with my fresh patent for "A positive cash-flow generation model based on the patenting of obvious ideas followed by aggressive litigation against entities using those ideas for practical, constructive purposes", guess who's first on my list?
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No Subject Given
To be completely fair, there's no problem with being pro-OpenSource and also holding a patent. Most OpenSource licenses depend on Copyright law to enforce their constraints. Holding a Patent is not the problem, attacking developers with patents is the problem. Even worse in this case, the patent owner isn't even developing their own implementation of the patented methods.
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