The point (Score 1)

I think the point here is being missed.

AJAX (its no longer a buzzword people, its essentially now in the vernacular) is still very new and on wobbly legs, but there's no denying the doors it has already opened. We're only just beginning to get a glimpse of the lands these doors lead to.

Here's a small company from the smallest, most remote state of Australia made up of a handful of developers and associated staff, and look at who appears to be sampling their wares? This is a David and Goliath situation, no?

Should the Morfik team just shrug and say "oh well, hard luck guys"? Of course they should stand up and lay claim to what they believe in. I don't think they are claiming to have IP on language translation. I believe they are standing up because they see far too many similarities in the method of translation that just shouldn't be ignored.

This is where their innovation should hold its mark. This is where they invested many years, dollars and experiments to do something that had never been done before: breaking the boundary between the desktop and the web, and making it accessible to the countless Delphi, Java, C#, Access, etc developers to step in and create. They didn't coin the term ajax, but they most certainly were among that first set of pioneers that evetually led to this name.

If GWT did its thing without any familiarity to Morfik, but the end product was the same, the guts would look completely different. They would have to, given the complexity of the end goal. I believe its this similarity of the internals that has made them stand up and claim that it is not simply a coincidence.

If everyone just lay down and allowed the big boys in when they shoved, well then there would be only one big boy. How much innovation would there be then?

Before you decide that Morfik is trying to claim innovation where it is absent, have a look at the history of Morfik itself. It's not particularly short for the industry to which it belongs. Then have a look at the history of the founders of Morfik. The innovation goes back to the early days of Windows 3.1. They have not ridden the coattails of others and then preached invention.
They have invented.

I believe they have no intention of using the "dark side" of IP. They are simply using IP for the reasons it exists.