Posted on 12/23/2009 2:45:21 PM PST by Ultra Sonic 007
Microsoft Word is now scheduled to be prohibited from sale beginning January 11, 2010. That's less than three weeks away. The good news: Microsoft has promised a fix, one which will be rolled out before the deadline arrives.
If you don't understand, you might have simply missed this story, or dismissed it as something that Microsoft would ultimately use its considerable clout to have pushed under a legal rug.
But it's no joke. In August of this year, a court sided with a small Canadian company called i4i that holds a 1998 patent on the way the XML language is implemented, finding that Microsoft was in violation of that patent. The result: Microsoft was told to license the code in question from i4i or reprogram it, or else Microsoft Word would have to be removed from sale in the market. The original ruling gave Microsoft until October to get its legal affairs in order, but appeals pushed that out a bit.
Now a federal court has upheld that original ruling -- plus a fat, $290 million judgment against the company -- imposing the new January 11 D-Day on the matter. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office will both be barred from sale as of that date -- though naturally you'll still be able to use copies of Word and Office that you already own, and Microsoft will be allowed to keep supporting those copies.
Unless Microsoft ships the promised technical workaround very quickly, things are going to get extremely dicey in the computer world, and fast. Not only will retail outlets selling shrinkwrapped copies of the software be affected, computer manufacturers (who complained loudly about this injunction when it was announced) who bundle Word and Office on the computers they sell will also be seriously impacted by the ruling.
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.yahoo.com ...
Ping.
eve = even.
Ouch!
They will have try to get a workaround so that they can get a little leverage in how much that they will have to pay i4i to not have to use it.
This hearkens back to the Microsoft vs. Stacker DOS 4.2 case, where MS had to pull a version of DOS and remove the stolen compression software.
If i4i does not get purchased, or calls MS’ bluff, I would advise those who use Word to turn off “automatic updates” for the time being.
Sorry that would be OpenOffice. http://www.openoffice.org
I don’t use MS Word. But I have to have it so I can reformat documents and send them to people who do use it.
This could be a real problem for people who want to buy a new computer with prepackaged software.
This is actually pretty humdrum. When I worked at Microsoft this kind of thing came up constantly. Basically, there are only so many reasonable ways to do things in software and so most every software developer is inadvertently infringing on others’ patents and vice versa. Typically, these issues are resolved with trades, i.e. Microsoft would trade a license to one of it’s thousands of patents in order to use the small company’s. Every once in a while they have to code around one. There’s always a way. It’s a pain, but not that unusual.
BFLR
My wife has used OpenOffice for several months. It is a terrible piece of software. It crashes when saving documents frequently leaving the documents corrupted and not able to open. I have heard many brag about OpenOffice but my experience has been terrible.
MSFT’s Wordpad does everything I need, sans Word’s bloat.
OpenOffice is awesome, it even gives me the capability to convert Excel Spreadsheets to PDF, I searched all over for a way to do this, and OpenOffice was the only way I could find, that was free.
My wife has used OpenOffice for several months. It is a terrible piece of software. It crashes when saving documents frequently leaving the documents corrupted and not able to open. I have heard many brag about OpenOffice but my experience has been terrible.
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I disagree.
1) Never lost a document.
2) Never crashed.
Are you sure you've got the right version for your computer and operating system and that it was correctly installed? My own experience with Open Office and Ubuntu has been very good.
You OSS dorks can’t even get your kludgeware right.
And if it’s been more than about a week, there’s probably a new stable build available.
The automatic uppercasing of first words in the sentence and such automated nonsense drives me up the wall!
I have the updates download automatically, but only the ones I choose install.
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