[ubuntu-uk] Judge bans Microsoft Word sales

[David King]

All software patents are bad. Although there might be a short term 
benefit for software like OpenOffice, if businesses think they cannot 
buy MS Word, or they literally cannot buy it, or they have it but are 
afraid to use it now, then they might go for OpenOffice.

As OpenOffice is given away free, I doubt that i4i would try to sue for 
any use of XML in OpenOffice.

But if this dents MS Office sales and gets more people using OpenOffice 
then it might have a positive benefit, although I expect MS will settle 
and sales of MS Office will continue.

It is also kind of ironic, given that MS threatened to sue the open 
source software community for undisclosed infringements on its patents. 
Maybe they need a taste of their own medicine.

The best result would be for everyone to move to patent-free software, 
and just make everything open source, which is probably something that 
Microsoft is still strongly opposed to, as their business model demands 
profits from sales rather than from support.


David King




Tony Pursell wrote:
> On 12 Aug 2009 at 18:20, Harry Rickards wrote:
>
>   
>> Thought this might be of interest...
>>
>> - -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: [Sussex] Judge bans Microsoft Word sales
>>     
>  
>   
>> This could be which breaks camels back on the idea of software patents
>> and how very dumb it all is.
>> It all down to fact that it using XML. Microsoft has be order to stop
>> selling ALL copies of Word in USA.
>>
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8197990.stm
>> - --
>>     
>
> Not quite 'down to the fact that it is using XML', I think.  i4i's own press 
> release says,
>
> "The jury agreed with i4i that certain versions of Microsoft's Word 2003 
> and Word 2007 products use “extensible mark up language”, or XML, 
> in a way that infringes i4i’s U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449."
>
> Note it says "... uses ... XML, in a way that infringes ..."
>
> This is far from saying that the use of XML infringes the patent.
>
> I don't know the ins and outs of the judgement, but the patent 
> describes a method of separating the content (raw data) and tags 
> (metadata) into separate files.  This is the example in the patent:-
>
> A SGML (or XML) document:-
>
> <Chapter>
> 	<Title>
> 	  The Secret Life of Data
> 	</Title>
> 	<Para>
> 	  Data is hostile. 
> 	</Para>
>   The End
> </Chapter>
>
> is decomposed into:-
>
> The Raw Content
>
> The Secret Life of DataData is hostile. The End 
>
> and:-
>
> A Metacode Map 
>
> Element No Element     Char Posn 
> 1                 <Chapter>   0 
> 2                 <Title>         0 
> 3                 </Title>        23 
> 4                 <Para>        23 
> 5                 </Para>       39 
> 6	       </Chapter> 46
>
> The patent describes various advantages of doing this such as a 
> person can produce a version of the document formatted in a 
> particular way (requiring a change to the metadata file) even though 
> they do not have permission to change the content. 
>
> Personally, I think this is just the sort of patent we need to stop.  It 
> describes a fairly simple algorithm that anyone could think up to solve 
> a problem like this and wouldn't think twice about it being the subject 
> of a patent.  If this sort of thing is patentable, it makes me wonder how 
> many patents I have infringed in the systems I have designed over the 
> years.
>
> Tony
>
>
>