Microsoft updates IE after patent spat

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How legal is it anyway?

All the Microsoft bashing/hunting/poaching aside, how legal is it to give other companies tacit permission to use a patent free of charge while going after the 800-pound gorilla with the biggest guns that can be afforded? Certainly not very ethical, in my opinion. From the get-go, the sole person who makes up Eolas Technologies has said he'd only target Microsoft for royalties for using his method of calling 3rd-party programs from within a browser, with the aim of breaking Microsoft's back. It is my understanding that at the time, nearly every major web browser, which included Netscape, Opera, GNUscape, Arachne, and NCSA Mosaic, was using the same set of instructions that allow Flash and other 'plug-in' types of add-on, browser helper-oriented programs to seamlessly add their particular brand of display muscle to the basic set of display tools included natively in a browser.

The way I see it, this is a case of a personal ax to grind getting way, WAY out of hand. The axe to grind, you may ask? Well, in my opinion, it is the fact that Microsoft was able to out-market and out-manuever Netscape. As far as I know, Microsoft licensed many of the same technologies developed in the Mosaic browser, which the original and first-to-market Netscape (at least when compared to when IE 1.0 was released) had also licensed, before doing the radical rewrite of code that happened when Netscape developed the Gecko browser engine.

I suppose that if Microsoft had done the same thing and redone the entire browser from scratch, Eolas couldn't have pulled this crapper off. But, on the other hand, should Microsoft had been able to anticipate such a thing happening when it believed it had all the bases covered when it paid licensing fees for Spyglass tech, tech which showed up in other browsers as well?

Here is a seemingly tangential thought...if Microsoft had used a different way of calling 3rd party programs from within it's browser, would IE have been more resistant to ActiveX exploits?

Posted by: EbonEquis   Posted on: 03/31/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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