Brian, You asked about what evidence there might be that Eolas intends to enforce the patent against other companies than Microsoft, particularly Open Source projects. To quote an article Eolas publishes on their web site (http://www.eolas.com/PatentWarPendingOverApplets.pdf):
Eolas plans to provide royalty-free licenses to individual and academic users of applets, commercial users would be charged for each piece of software that uses the embedded applications. That charge could range from 50 cents per piece of software for heavy users (on the order of 1 million units) all the way up to $5 per unit for more limited usage. That is from a 1995 interview with Eolas CEO Mike Doyle, at a time when Netscape had 75% marketshare. The discussion is all about Netscape, Spyglass and Sun, not Microsoft, and makes fairly broad claims regarding the patent's impact. Microsoft became the target of litigation only because of marketshare and opportunism, not philosophy. Eolas says that they are staking a claim to own the ability to deploy client-side interactive web applications. That makes this an Open Source and Open Standards issue, not a pro-/con-Microsoft issue. I don't really care who the particular antagonist(s) and protagonist(s) are in the patent litigation. This is about the <APPLET>, <EMBED>, <OBJECT>, and <SCRIPT> tags in HTML, along with other analogous and related technologies. A copy of the court ruling is here: http://www.computerbytesman.com/906patent/ruling.pdf. It is interesting to note that the judge wrote that Mike Doyle was untruthful both in the patent application to the USPTO and to the Court. But he also indicates that he found in favor of Eolas partially because "the financial loss Microsoft would bear under a worst case scenario is large but easily bearable." Basically, he says that Microsoft put on a poor defense, and can afford the loss. The W3C has created a mailing list (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-plugins/) on the patent issues. One interesting observation on the list from several Europeans is that since the patent is US only, a US only version of browsers should eliminate all interactivity features, and the rest of the world could continue to have them. --- Noel --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
