Web Services Patented by IBM and Microsoft

daecabhir writes "This article from ZDNet is an interesting read. Not just because of the implications of what IBM and Microsoft appear to be doing, but because it again brings to light how susceptible many standards processes continue to be to commercial interests. You would think that being early adopters, crafting the standards so that they can have the first and most compliant implementations might be enough - but I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products, so they have to go down the route of intellectual property ownership, enforcement and RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory, whatever "reasonable" means) licensing fees."

Random

Everybody know RAND is a random number generator function.....

Quality of their products not at issue!

I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products...

That's a bit harsh. They're not doing this instead of making products. In fact, as I understand the article, their products have to be successful for this to work.

If you were in business and you spotted a potentially limitless income source in addition to your present core business, wouldn't you leap at it, regardless of how certain you were of your product?

Of course, this is the thing about corporations: there's no "income cap" like there's a karma cap, so there's always an incentive to go on pursuing more and more money by any legal (well, normally) means. I'm not advocating Communism, just observing that the businesses we consider most successful have generally got there not only thanks to good products but also a certain rapacity.

Re:Quality of their products not at issue!

Hmm. Limitless income source? I guess it depends.

Do I have to feed 3 infants to rabid pit bulls every week, to collect?

Do I have to lock old people up in a dungeon, and feed them moldy dog chow to collect?

Does it require poisoning the water table of a major region or continent?

Or running for political office?

Selling my soul to satan?

Actually, there are even more, but you must see my point by now... there are any number of things that I consider either too tasteless or unethical to want to make money off ot them. And I think raping the entire world, and its first true global network, just so they can own a piece of its soul for all eternity, fits in nicely with the above examples.

It doesn't matter

If they do decide to try to get royalties, they will find out that a lot of people are jumping to other technologies.

I am about to start a new contract for a bank, and I'll be involved in deciding what technologies will be used for new online application.

I am sure that SOAP/WSDL will not be considered, until we're sure what the real story is.

If someone decides that everyone has to stop using SSH, we'd have temporary solution tomorrow, and a permanent one few weeks/months ago.

The same will happen with this.

Re:It doesn't matter

You certainly don't know how the world works. Underestimating the power of Microsoft and IBM to set a standard is dangerous, and overestimating the people's inteligence regarding licesing is another.

After all, i don't see many people arguing because Office locks them into Office, they blame other files for not reading Office. Same with a non IE browser, etc. Same with the idiotic EULAs which even the biggest corporations accept, refusing to have ANY right if program flaws compromise their operations yet are scary to use ANY free, open-source, tested and even audited piece of code out there.

I don't mean to be negative, but you have to grant me that "inteligence and comon sense will prevail" doesn't work in real life.

Re:It doesn't matter

You certainly don't know how the world works. Underestimating the power of Microsoft and IBM to set a standard is dangerous, and overestimating the people's inteligence regarding licesing is another.

Actually, I think X.25 had a very valid point. Looking at Microsoft's sales figures for Office XP and Windows XP, and the enthusiastic switch to use Visual Studio.NET and write Web Services instead of using good ol' MFC (no, wait, I don't know anyone who's done that) I think it's clear that the whole universe will not suddenly leap up and jump just because MS says so.

The business world seems to have decided enough is enough with the latest round of MS software. Where were all the pre-ordered WinXP installations this time? Where are the corporate-wide drives to upgrade to Office XP? Why is everyone so sceptical about the whole product activation issue? They've woken up, that's why. MS have lost the momentum they used to carry their last major releases (Win2K and O2K) and they know this.

I don't think home users are buying it, either. I know quite a few tech savvy people who have bought new boxes since WinXP came out, and quite a few more who aren't so tech savvy. An awful lot of both have been asking obvious but difficult questions about WinXP, the popular practice among retailers of supplying a "recovery CD" rather than a genuine Windows CD, whether they can have Win2K instead, etc. I'm sure the overall impact of that hasn't been lost on MS either.

MS may be the masters of marketing hype and spin, but sooner or later, the paying public stops buying it. MS lawyers can win all the court cases they like, but the bad press is still bad press, and it has, and will continue to, hurt them. People are becoming aware of the way MS behaves, and unless they can do something about it (which obviously they're trying, but their success is far from guaranteed) their ability to force through new standards is far from guaranteed, either.

Where are the documents?

The article says that the documents are on the W3C Website, but I cant find them. Where are they, and what exactly is patented?

Can this even hold up?

Wouldn't it be fairly easy to demonstrate in court that people were implementing web services long before IBM or Microsoft patented it?

WS-I: The start of a fork?

Hm, when I first read about WS-I some time ago, my first thought was "is this an attempt by some big companies to fork the web"?

I certainly think it looks like it.

Well, I guess it pretty much had to happen. These companies are a bunch of shameless freeloaders who are trying to turn a big profit from the open infrastructure of the Internet. And when they don't get their way with patent licensing, because W3C realizes that RAND licensing is not going to move technology forward, it is not surprising that they abuse their power to do a fork.

We've got to be on the alert on this. I think the best we can do is to make sure that we make good and extensive implementations if W3C standards, also for commerce applications.

Article

I can't read that article, the adverts are too distracting. What does it say?

Alternatively, how do you turn off animations in netscape 6.2? Can you block image-servers?

Its simple...don't use it.

I feel the direction we should take as a community is to develope global software solutions for the masses by the masses. This ensures the scalability, reliablity, and useability of the software. As well we should focus our attentions to creating internet protocols that ensure the integrity of data and the near perfect delivery of data and content. If I were an english major or a marketing genius I could fit more buzz words in here.

The bottom line is corporations will make every attempt no matter how pro-this or pro-that (IBM using Linux and OSD) or the usefullness (M$ stealing OS code from OSD for Winblows) to gobble financial assests. The best part is once a company reaches a certain level of capitol its all numbers.

If M$ wants to charge its only out of fear of admitting that free works better than not free in a lot of cases. Charging seems absurd to us because we are used to being able to use free a lot. We use free now. And that is free as in free beer.

Everyday we use things that are FORCED upon us that are not free as in free beer and not free as in freedom of choice, change, and modification. Telephones, electricity, ambulances, hospitals, public and mass transit, CD-R's, RIAA, MPAA, and so on.

Screw it. I'm preaching to the choir on this aren't I?

Later,

Rivendahl

Patents have a purpose

I think we need to think like IBM or Microsoft for a second. If I were an excutive at one of these companies I would patent technology I spent a millions to develop to make money to cover the cost of developing it. That is what a patent is for. Besides given IBMs track record lately they could use there patents to screw Microsoft. For instance they could say that anything that is open source doesn't have to pay a royalty and anything close source does.

In fact IBM having patents for web services insures competition. Microsoft can't afford to do anything stupid with the lisence (think samba xp thing) now that they don't have pieces to the puzzle patented, and they need web services in the future to servive.

am I missing something?

If those funny guys who came up with Esperanto had patented it they'd be rolling in it now because obviously we would all have to speak it if they had patented it.

It was fun while it lasted. The monopolists are ..

regrouping and clamping down.

M$ is well known in its rapacity and IBM was deservedly the subject of the longest antitrust suit of the last century/millenium. Both have been money mills for lawyers on both sides of the issue.

All traffic will have to go through their gates (no pun intended,) and they will collect a tithe on every packet.

Look for rapid adoption of IPv6 after that since they will need to identify the source, route and destination of every packet in order to charge you for every hop.

Shades of Canada's x.25 packet network which use to cost me plenty every month.

The costs will realign themselves to make it impossible to for individuals to contemplate downloading squat since the cost of transmission will equal or exceed the cost purchase of a hard good.

Only businesses will be able to use the net and the size of those businesses will scale with the cost per packet. Eventually, only the rich and large corporations will be on the net and by then it won't be worth using.

If there is anything that the last series of wars has shown its that armies and money aren't power, control of communications is power.

And the powerful don't share with the powerless (that means YOU) regardless of the potential benefits for anyone involved.

Instead they hoard communications, distort and prevaricate and depending on the armaments available send out the bombers, the local equivalent of the "Ton Ton Macoute" or their own children, the ones who who haven't yet starved to death, out amongst the crowd wearing bombs strapped to their chests.

Life imitates art

"Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny, join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son."

Standards are not an issue

As far as I understand it(god help, even I could be wrong, so don't be offended), issue is that all standards that IBM and M$ can prove rights for are not in W3C.

And now stupid question, what stops web designers and web apps programmers not to code W3C supported only. (W3C is part of EULA isn't it, and all I'm hearing that EULA has C# standards so it can't be forked from M$ side, this could prove wrong, or not) :-(

Must admit that web apps aren't my field so, I'd like if someone would mod me to understand this better this would be appreciated.

Co-operate on standards, compete on implementation

... that's how the Internet came to flourish, and that's the only way future network technologies will ever have a chance. Anything else is quite simply doomed.

The existence of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and all the rest, which were agreed upon by the major players, created markets in which everyone had their chance to create the best products. We've seen in recent years how hard it is to make money in the Internet, since users are accustomed to getting everything for free. If it had cost money just to use the thing in the first place, it never would have gotten off the ground.

If standards for web services are not royalty-free, then there will be no such thing within a few years. Or perhaps the idea of web services will survive on the basis of other, royalty-free protocols, but SOAP and WDSL and other patented technologies will be a footnote in history. Let IBM and M$ go ahead if they want to kill off their own inventions, it really doesn't bother me a bit.

Why Cant We Do A Linux.....?

what i dont understand is why we cant ( people who are worried about the take over of the net my companies , OSS people , coders who fear the goobling up of the net ) cant make these standards themselfs like Linux the community itself making them available to W3C.It really depresses me to think that we have no choice. Is it possible or is it to big of a project? i dont know but i dont want the net to be owned......

Don't Change Horses....

This seems rather foul and underhanded. People are already committed to using SOAP and WSDL. *Now* Microsoft and IBM announce that this (and attaching techs) aren't royalty free, well, that smacks too much of "Here, kid, your first two hits are free."

If MS and IBM decide to enforce RAND, a lot of businesses are gonna just smile and take it you-know-where. I thought the W3C only proposed royalty free standards?

Scaremongering....

What a piece of garbage - does ANYONE seriously believe that a piece of "technology" such as SOAP would have a royalty placed on it?

Both MS and IBM are bright enough to realise that it isnt THAT good and that if they attempted such a move whichever protocol in question would just be swapped out for some other propriety protocol without the licensing fees. The high costs of commercial ORBs have been enough to keep CORBA away from being a widly used technology for years, any form of additional licensing on any protocol/standard will have exactly the same effect.

Puh-lease!!

Eminent Domain

Perhaps it's high time for the various governments we have floating around (they must be there for something) to take the IP for universally adopted standards by eminent domain.

On the other hand, we have all seen how competent our governments have been when confronted with technological issues and campaign contributions...

A more enlightened IP policy: IEEE standards

The IEEE Standards Association, home to the 802 family (Ethernet [ieee802.org], Wi-Fi [ieee802.org], etc.) and legions of others, has a more enlightened IP policy, IMHO, as described in their bylaws [ieee.org] and operations manual [ieee.org]. From the bylaws [ieee.org]:

IEEE standards may include the known use of patent(s), including patent applications, provided the IEEE receives assurance from the patent holder or applicant with respect to patents essential for compliance with both mandatory and optional portions of the standard. This assurance shall be provided without coercion and prior to approval of the standard (or reaffirmation when a patent becomes known after initial approval of the standard). This assurance shall be a letter that is in the form of either

a) A general disclaimer to the effect that the patentee will not enforce any of its present or future patent(s) whose use would be required to implement the proposed IEEE standard against any person or entity using the patent(s) to comply with the standard or
b) A statement that a license will be made available without compensation or under reasonable rates, with reasonable terms and conditions that are demonstrably free of any unfair discrimination.

This assurance shall apply, at a minimum, from the date of the standard's approval to the date of the standard's withdrawal and is irrevocable during that period.

This seems to provide a good compromise; patented technology may get into a standard, but only after disclosure and subsequent approval of the standard by the organization. In addition, while I can't speak for the IEEE-SA as a whole, 802 voters vote as individuals--there are no "corporate votes." Individual consultants have the same voting power as a corporate VP: While the VP may spend corporate $$ to have a collection of subordinates attend enough meetings to become eligible voters, members of the EFF, or any other collection of people, could also attend and vote. While the 802 process isn't perfect, and abuses have been known to occur, this aspect of the IEEE standards process also works to get the best technical standard produced.

HP/IBM on /.

I've always wondered why it is that most people on /. seem to love IBM, but bash HP every chance they get. To quote from the article

"Against the backdrop of the W3C's emerging plan to adopt a primarily royalty-free-based patent policy, the royalty-free vs. RAND controversy reached full boil last October when Hewlett-Packard withdrew its support as a sponsor of IBM and Microsoft's W3C WSDL submission on the basis that WSDL might not be royalty-free"

It seems to me that HP supports open standards more than IBM does. And besides, IBM has historically been just as monopolistic as MS ever was. Also, HP & Compaq seem so support Linux as much as IBM does. I'm sure there is a good reason why people here admire IBM but think HPaq is doomed. I'd love to have someone explain it to me.

Where is the meat?

If there was something genuinely new in these web standards, I could see at least having a debate about whether patents on them are reasonable. But most of the web stuff is just doing with HTTP and XML what has been well-known since the 1970's and 1980's in terms of binary RPC mechanisms; patents on those mostly have expired or will expire soon.

Even if there were some real inventions in that space, the older mechanisms, translated to HTTP and XML, are perfectly adequate for serving the needs of most business applications. So, there is no reason for the W3C to standardize anything that involve Microsoft or IBM patents (or patents by anybody else, for that matter).

Boomerang patenting.

It's very likely that enforcing the pantens will backfire especially for IBM. Unlike MS they can't use their web services interface to tie users to an OS (which they use to make money).
If they start scaring away developers by royalties they'll will also scare away customers from WebSphere. And this would be a painful financial blow.

Patents

A friend made an intersting point about patents the other day: "Imagine where we would be now if people had patented buble sorts etc."

Those parts of Web Services are unnecessary

It's not clear if the article is a complete description of the problem, but what they mention is WSDL and extensions to SOAP, not the whole family.

As far as WSDL is concerned, have you ever seen it? It's the most confusing, ill-designed, vague document on the planet. Many people have mentioned that XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) is far more suited to description of software objects, and would be far better for publishing/discovering web services. It's the format for UML, after all. It's here. [omg.org]

As far as SOAP extensions are concerned, any programmer that has needed to distribute software knows that you should always adhere to the core standards when designing your application. The use of any extension, or any veering too far to the left or right, will make your application unportable.

So let them have their members-only club, with a membership of 2.

Then quit using SOAP now....

SOAP really does not do anything that is not provided by nice simple been around for a long time xml-rpc. We should ask google to quit using SOAP and pick up a xml-rpc interface to their search engine now. Personally I will never use SOAP due to it's bloated implementation and the fact that it's design was soley driven by MS with no reguard to the community.

Another reason to avoid .Net

If this artcile doesn't show you why you should avoid Microsoft technologies for application development I don't know what would. Microsoft has a long history of the "Embrace and Extend" tactics.

Microsoft is positioning the pieces right now and a lot of people are taking the bait. Once there is an established user base using these technologies (WSDL, .Net, etc.) they will all of a sudden come up with a "new standard."

I am all for corporations making a profit from their software, but trying to set yourself up for a "tollbooth" at the expense of everyone who embraces the "standards" you contribute to the public, well, that just plain sucks.

--Jon

Not About Confidence...

You would think that being early adopters, crafting the standards so that they can have the first and most compliant implementations might be enough - but I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products, so they have to go down the route of intellectual property ownership, enforcement and RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory, whatever "reasonable" means) licensing fees.

It's not about being confident in your product. It's about investing loads of money into R&D before you produce a product.

Look at any other market where a company needs to do a LOT of R&D to produce a product. Pharmaceutical companies have to invest millions and millions to come up with a new drug to cure whatever. If someone else could immediately produce a generic alternative it wouldn't make sense for the company to do R&D in the first place. Why let someone else profit off their hard work and research?

Any time a company needs to do a lot of R&D to come up with a product it makes sense to seek intellectual property protection (patents, copyright, whatever). Otherwise they're just throwing away money on research - it has nothing to do with confidence in their product(s).

Sounds like Unisys

It sounds to me like the author of this article expects Microsoft and IBM to pull a trick like Unisys pulled a few years ago.

(For those who don't know, Unisys owned the patent for LZW, the compression algorithm used in GIF files. GIF was the standard Compuserve graphics format, and became the de-facto standard for the web, too. Once it became popular, Unisys began to ask for royalties for software that used LZW. It was at that point that the online pr0n industry moved to JPG files instead of GIF).

I don't know what kinds of rights MS and IBM retain on these standards, so I don't know what kinds of royalties they would ask for (would it be per program, per software license, or per copy of the standard, etc), but I would hope that the industry would have learned from their mistakes in the past with using proprietary technologies.

So...

If MS and IBM have copyrights and whatnot on the WEbServies.. which .NET is a BIGASS chunk of... what about Ximian's MONO?

Which patents?

Could someone post a list of the patents IBM and Microsoft hold in regard to Web Services? I think it's time to find out what those patents are and start a new trully open and royalty-free standards race. Off the top of my head I can imagine (and bring to fruition within 6 months) several alternate ways to do what Web Services try to do today, and this time do it right (come on, WSDL is COMPLEX, and where are the standard security messures?). So, post here links to those patents, and let's teach the big guys a lesson.

2 possibilities

One is that IBM will open up the patents and allow them to be user by all. In getting the patent they would be preventing someone like Amazon or someone else from saying you can use it. So in this case this coule be a good thing. This of course depends on how committed IBM is to open source.

The second possibility is that somoene look at all these patents and make improvements to them or challenge them and invalidate them. In makeing improvements to them they would have to be non obvious and not impleied. In the case that you invalidate them just come up with proior art.

I cant spell.. will slashdot include a spellchecker if I pay for the service???

Im moving to germany

All you losers in the US ... I can only pity you. As long as such foolish patents are not recognized in more developed parts of the world, someone is relatively safe(r).

The 'net's gonna be co-opted. Internet 2's here...

The 'net as we KNEW it has moved over to [secret] and to InterNet2.

The military has its own ultra-secure network that's NOT connected.

Academe has its own ultra-high-performance network that's NOT connected.

Face it, the originators of the internet, the military and academe no longer have any interest, need or say in what's happening.

The 'net that we're using now is a floundering piece of commercialized, lowest-common-denominator drivel that's going to descend into a pay-per-packet, metered, toll-gated rabbit warren of compromised hardware, lowest bidder SLAs (service level agreements) and cracked-all-to-Hell software and protocols.

But it'll be just good enough for the business who'll use it (because they have no other choice.)

And it'll be brought to you by people who didn't want it, didn't believe in it, and only see it as a way to make a buck now that all this silly inventiveness is over and the boring business of business can resume.

And you? Bwahahaha. Like they give a fuck. Pay and shut up.

UFO is better than RAND && Stallman

so they have to go down the route of intellectual property ownership, enforcement and RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory, whatever "reasonable" means) licensing fees.

lwn.net has a great tidbit on the fallacious conotation of this RAND term, vis-a-vis a complaint to the LWN editors from Richard Stallman [stallman.org]:

[Quote LWN.net [lwn.net] below. This is in the frontpage at the moment, it'll scroll off eventually, and wont be there for posterity. I can't find a better URL for it, however the date on the frontpage is 2002/04/11, in the future you might find it through that.]

Licensing terms: what's in a name? Richard Stallman recently objected to our use of the term "reasonable and non-discriminatory" to describe certain classes of software and patent licenses. These licenses, require a payment for the use of the patented technology; the RAND terms just ensure that everybody can use that technology for the same payment. According to Mr. Stallman, the name RAND is inappropriate because:

• 
  
• By requiring a fee for use, the license is clearly discriminatory against free software.
  
  
• This discrimination, of course, is not reasonable.
  

Mr. Stallman's suggested term is "UFO" for "Uniform Fee Only."

BTW, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, but the complete Stallman biography book [oreilly.com], over at O'Reilly, is now available gratis, online!

Boy, IBM has a real good argument there...

IBM opposed the move to a royalty-free-only framework partially on the basis that companies must be allowed to maintain their patents in order to defend themselves against potential patent infringement suits by other companies.

Oh, ok.. so what does that have to do with royalties? You can maintain your patent without charging royalties for web use, and still protect against someone taking ideas from your patent for non-web[service|whatever] use.. This is as weak an argument as the RIAA saying that file trading is the reason they have a 10% decline in profits..

I have been really happy with IBM's pushing open source in general, their developerworks articles are sometimes good, etc, but this kind of thing really makes me lose a little respect for them.. MS of course doesn't even have much of a bright side, no use discussin them, this is in-character for them.

Hardball

The big companies are starting to play hardball, attempting to force RAND "standards" on us. Perhaps it's time we started playing hardball too. A large percenatage of core internet software is open source. What would happen if the default install of open source software started DROPPING any packets for RAND encumbered "standards"? A dead standard, that's what.

Note that I said "default install" would drop packets. Any software with this feature should have a simple option to disable this.

-

Read the Whole Article

Official documents on the W3C's site support Sutor's assertion. According to the home page of the W3C's Web Services Description Working Group, neither IBM nor Microsoft are asserting their intellectual property claims over WSDL. The same can also be said for SOAP 1.2, which falls under the jurisdiction of the royalty-free charter of the W3C's XML Protocol Working Group. Additionally, HP's status as a co-submitter of WSDL has been restored.

However, the same cannot be said for many of the other Web services protocols that actually make SOAP and WSDL useful. For example, IBM and Microsoft have yet to release their intellectual property rights to two SOAP extensions: one extension encrypts and applies digital signatures to SOAP messages, another attaches documents to the messages

They aren't threatening to charge royalties on WSDL and SOAP, just on their extensions to it. I don't understand why slashdot readers are outraged by this.

It seems completely reasonable to me. If IBM spends the time and money to translate domain knowledge into a SOAP extension (such as for encryption), IBM deserves to get a return on the investment. If you don't like this, write your own encryption extension.

What's the difference between De Facto and De Jure

De Facto - A standard created by market consensus that is based on the dominate standard in the marketplace, see also "What people buy"

De Jure - A standard created by a committee seeking to create a standard that is inclusive enough to be practical, yet specific enough to ensure quality, see also "What has little impact on the world"

The very premise in this original post belies an naive view on what purposes standards bodies serve - they exist to clean up older technology, often for the express purpose of making older technology a safer foundation to build on. They have little bearing on innovation and the creation of new standards.

Quick Quiz - name a standard that was established before it was implemented in the market as a de jure standard (disclaimer - 'process' standards like ISO 9002 don't count, they don't really exist in nature).

Danger! Royalty-Bearing So-Called Standards!

Microsoft [microsoft.com] is at it again, this time big-blue [ibm.com] is right along with them. IBM and Microsoft are trying to erect so-called standard-bodies that would allow them to get-around the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C [w3.org]) requirements for standards to be royalty-free.
Read this article [zdnet.com] over at ZDNet to get an overview of what is going on.

While they did release the core SOAP [w3.org] and UDDI [uddi.org] specifications to the royalty-free process, they are trying to create "piggy-back" protocls that will ensue royalties (i.e. security signing of SOAP messages, file attachments on soap messages and security policy negotiations). They are trying to establish these standards through the UDDI [uddi.org] and WS-I [ws-i.org] organizations. These organizations are perceived to be open and acceptable standard bodies, but they are not. They are heavily controlled by both juggernauts and conform to their interests.

The W3C and the IETF are the only true standard bodies of the Internet! Do not be fooled by IBM and Microsoft and do not be sucked into their grip!
They are trying to ensure that Open-Source, Free implementations of these standards will not be possible! They will be trying to become "toll-boothes" on the Internet.

Re:The trouble with patents

I don't know why everyone here hates patents...Once of the really great things about a patent is its allows a person with less money not to get crushed by an IBM when the have a good idea.

It's great that we can prevent IBM from competing with us. We just don't like it that a company as big as IBM can do the same back to us.

That's not necessarily a double-standard: IBM has massive market leverage, so its actions have much more of an impact on us than ours do on them.

The line between IP protection and monopolistic practice is not an easy one to draw these days.

Re:It is unpatentable as a tecnology...

Don't fool yourself, they trademarked "windows" for petes sake!
With enough lawyers you can do anything...

Re:The trouble with patents

If you can prove that you had the idea before the competitor that stole it then you get the patent.

If you can prove being the key phrase here. The problem with a little guy defending his patent against MegaCorp Inc. is that MegaCorp Inc. has a battalion of lawyers with nothing better to do than to bury the case in paperwork thereby outspending the little guy until he has to quit before winning his case.

See this page [tinaja.com] at Don Lancaster's site for more information.

To the people who are saying that if it turns out that these technologies are patented, we'll simply come up with an alternative: the problem isn't in the implementation of the technology (i.e., what's been sent to the W3C) the problem is that a patent covers the idea behind the technology and any attempt to implement the idea will also likely violate the patent.

I think one of the root causes of these situations is that the USPTO is issuing patents for ideas that are not truly innovative but which are pretty obvious to any programmer trying to solve that particular problem.

Re:Just boycott the technology

That would be the smart thing to do, but most companies don't think like that. If a company could make more money by using soap than other free technologies, most would choose soap. Look at all the companies using windows mostly because they don't want to spend money retrain M$ office users (maybe these people should take a look at crossover office or hire people who know OpenOffice) . In addition to resisting these technologies, free alternatives need to be created.