Date: 09/30/05 (Mozilla)    Keywords: html, web, microsoft

Two years ago a jury awarded little Eolas $500,000,000 in damages for patent infringement by Microsoft. Microsoft danced the usual dance, first appealing to a higher court and then exhorting web-standards organization W3C to join them in asking the US patent office for a reconsideration of Eolas patent.Yesterday, the patent office ruled the patent valid. Microsoft is at the end of their games. Now, they have to pay Eolas and alter IE to avoid the Eolas patent.

So, why is the 'duck posting this to the Mozilla community?

Well, let's just say that the patent is fairly wide-ranging. Eolas' patent covers technologies such as ActiveX, but equally covers Mozilla plug-ins, the HTML Embed and Object tags, embedded object pop-up controls, and XBL (Mozilla's binding language). Microsoft has a half-billion to pay-up, what does the Mozilla Foundation have? For sure not enough money!

Maybe Eolas will license the Mozilla Foundation the patent in some way shape or form? If they do not; might not that effect Mozilla's third licensing option: the GPL, thereby preventing any further distribution of Firefox? could the patent possibly be expanded to include Firefox Extensions, one of our few advantages over IE?

I'm not thinking on the possible troubles too much. Until something bad happens, nothing real has happened and for all I know the owner of Eolas is a firefox user and wouldn't dream of hurting us... stranger things have happened.

Qvacks.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/mozilla/324524.html