Ping.
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.
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
MSFT’s Wordpad does everything I need, sans Word’s bloat.
The automatic uppercasing of first words in the sentence and such automated nonsense drives me up the wall!
I would bet huge money that some years ago, Microsoft had i4i “demonstrate” whatever product / program / protocol we’re talking about here, decided some months later that they weren’t quite interested in it, and some months after that, abra cadabra, there it is in Microsoft Word.
That’s how Microsoft became Microsoft.
>> the way the XML language is implemented
And CO2 is a pollutant.
Anyone familiar with the specifics of the patent violation?
Well, he who lives by the corruption of intellectual property law dies by the corruption of intellectual property law.
The patent affects OpenOffice too, as well as any other word processing program that uses XML.
Using XML to represent a document is obvious to any person ‘skilled in the art’ of computer programming, as the patent lingo goes.
These idiotic combo patents (use A to create B) make practically impossible nowadays to write a non-trivial software application without tripping over a dozen of them. This includes writing freeware for Linux.
I own one of these idiot combo patents: Use SQL to create a user password database. My boss made me apply for it, and I was astonished to see it granted.